57,4.3209,"green","He calls himself""Waldo""",98,"Y"
This is a perfectly valid CSV file, but SSIS will choke. I ended up writing a custom script component to load these files anyways.
That said, I absolutely love SQL Server, and I think this guy is a little over the top in his religious hatred of it. In an Enterprise setting, it works really, really well.
Excel in particular drives me up the will. Plus the automatic inferences in Excel break all kind of things. Have a six digit number? Randomly a date. Have a UPC? Going to corrupt it in numerous ways (leading zero stripping, converting to scientific notation, etc).
I can definitely sympathize with anyone who criticises Microsoft's CSV support. They really just want you to use an Excel format (either the binary format or the zip-XML one). However Excel formats are overly complicated for the type of data migration work CSV is often utilised for (XML is too large, it adds up, and requires custom code to import/export (even if that is XSL from CSV), JSON might be better but isn't "yet" popular).
I wish that line-item JSON were more popular, it's more expressive than csv, the tooling (programatic) seems to be a bit better, and much less verbose than equivalent XML, which I always had a problem with, as mapping XML to/from an object model is always more painful by comparison.
line-item utf-8 json+gz work really well for import/export data...
There's no such thing. CSV is a convention that people mostly agree on but there's no written CSV standard and no CSV standards body.
It's also totally counterproductive. If you tell me to use something and you start telling me things that aren't true I'm going to be deeply skeptical of your possibly-valid points if I know you're either ignorant or dishonest in some cases.
It is one thing to say 'SQL Server takes some effort to import CSV files with X scenarios'; but to say it does not import them at all?
There is the appearance of facts, but mostly it is bias by omission. Take for example the CSV complaints..."MS SQL Server can neither import nor export CSV. Most people don't believe me when I tell them this". This is just false, patently and obviously false. BCP and SSIS, both part of SQL Server have excellent support for importing and exporting flat files. I did keyword searches through the whole post, no instances of BCP, SSIS or Integration Services (the long term for SSIS).
I am sure others will break this thing apart section for section but I wish people would be fair and open about stuff like this - I mean, seriously if you are going to put the time and effort into a long document like this, don't be so blatantly bias.