Question:
About a year ago we had some data migrated by an outside service from Informix 4.1 to SQL Server 6.5. It appeared at the time that everything went well. However, we have recently discovered some records missing.

We have a copy of the original data files at the time of the migration (on a CD-ROM). However, the machine with the Informix software is long gone.

Would you please provide any direction you can as to the steps required to import these files into Microsoft Access/SQL Server?

Answer:
What do the data files look like? I assume that someone used an “unload” command to unload the Informix data to a flat file. If the data files appear to be delimited by the UNIX pipe (“|”) symbol, that’s probably the case.

I’m not sure how you’d do it in Access, but you may want to look into the bcp (bulk copy) command in SQL Server. I’m not sure if that command is still around; it was still there the last time I looked at SQL Server several years ago. Commands such as bcp provide a way of loading delimited files into the database. You’ll need to research the actual use of bcp to get the format right. In Access, you might want to search your help system for such keywords as “load,” “unload,” “bulk copy,” “import,” “export,” or “delimit.”