Neal Waterstreet

Accessing CSV files on a UNC file share

by Leave a Comment

Recently I was working on a project to extract data from CSV files for a client. The package was pretty standard and it ran fine under my account in BIDS. The issue occurred when I tried to deploy and executed under the service account. The error message “Description: The file name property is not valid. The file name is a device or contains invalid characters” was not too helpful, but it did lead me in the right direction.

After asking around I found that another developer had a similar issue and pointed me to a couple of blog posts:

http://www.sqlservercentral.com/Forums/Topic1128829-148-2.aspx

http://sqlblogcasts.com/blogs/simons/archive/2010/03/03/SSIS—Access-Denied-with-UNC-paths—The-file-name-is-a-device-or-contains-invalid-characters.aspx

It turned out that the service account had access to the directory that contained the CSV files, but not the entire path.

\\Server\Directory 1\Directory 2\CSV Files\My File.csv

Once the account was granted access to ‘Directory 1’ and ‘Directory 2’ the issue was resolved. Hopefully this post will save someone some time if they run into this.

2014 Goals: Year End Review

by Leave a Comment

So, finally ready to discuss my 2014 goals…

Certification
Status: Pass, 1 exam left for MCSE, just need to get it knocked out. I am still prepping for Tableau Desktop and Hortonworks Certified Apache Hadoop 2.0 Developer.

Projects
Status: Pass, Hard to measure, but all projects are in good shape and met all deadlines.

Healthcare VC:
Status: Pass, We had a good run last year and have had a few months off. Jumping back in this month and really need to get it where we want/expect it to be.

SQL Events/Training:
Status: Pass, I attended 1 SQLSaturday (Nashville) and the PASS BA Conference in the spring. Normally, with formal training this year I would say this is a failure, but I was able to learn a lot on my own in many new areas.

Learn something new:
Status: Pass, this started slowly , but I’ve spent most of my time lately with R, Tableau and Hadoop. Still need to look at BIML more.

Blog:
Status: Fail. Not nearly enough posts. I’ll try again in 2015.

Technical Books:
Status: Pass. I lost count of many I read which is a good thing, but need to start doing some reviews of those.

Review Yearly Goals:
Status: Fail. I stopped looking by mid year.

So, not good but not bad either. I had a great year, but really fell short with blogging and speaking. I’m trying to find a better way to quantify my goals for 2015. Maybe I need a Dashboard and Metrics…