I have to confess; I have had traumatic experiences with variant data type in my beginning as a software developer, in fact, I always have believed that it is an anti-pattern, at least in the OOP world, on the other hand in the Database world it gains much relevance, Why? Because every column inside a table is supposed to be a specific datatype, otherwise it could create a great number of conflict and uncomfortable situations.

There are some special scenarios where we require to generate a customized workload in our SQL Server instance, these could be specific T-SQL statements as simple queries or stored procedures.  In some cases, we need to simulate a workload for troubleshooting common errors related to deadlocks or race conditions, even for testing purposes in which we want to analyze the behavior of SQL Server in presence of some conditions or data distributions.

The purpose of this article is to show you how you can use SSIS for doing a classic task – for example, importing a Flat File into a SQL Server work table.  This article is a step by step guide and the first one in a series.