SQL Saturday 294 Philadelphia, Nostalgic!

Less than a week left and I’m extremely excited about SQL Saturday in Philly on June 7th, 2014 and the Precon the day before (I signed up for Allan Hirt’s).  I lived in Philadelphia for about 10 years during which I went to college, had my first two full-time jobs, and my first to kids were born in that area. This SQL Saturday is going to be a blast from the past for me.  The actual event takes place in Malvern PA which is off of 202 in the Northwestern Region of the Philadelphia suburbs.  It is part of the “mainline” and close to Valley Forge, King of Prussia and other historic/tourist attractions.  I used to work in the Mainline area for Johnson Matthey in Wayne (and part time in Malvern) so I’m very excited about taking this trip back to visit friends and family.

For those of you that don’t know about SQL Saturday it is a fantastic event. Here are some of the reasons I’ve encouraged people to attend SQL Saturday events:

 

SQL Saturday in Washington D.C. December 8, 2012

This is my first time attending a SQL Saturday event and I’m quite excited. If you live in or near the D.C. Metro area I hope to see you there. If you have not registered, you still have a chance:

http://sqlsaturday.com/173/eventhome.aspx

I’ve put together a short list of the sessions that I am planning to attend with some brief reasons why. Hope to see you all there!

 

Finding and removing hidden characters in your data using dynamic T-SQL

It has been a long morning for me. It was supposed to be a standard run for our quarterly data aggregations but one of the data import SSIS packages kept failing. The problem was a conversion problem from varchar type to float and I kept getting the following error:

Msg 8114, Level 16, State 5, Line 1
Error converting data type varchar to float.

However, my data was numeric I checked it many times… or was it really 100% numeric?