Manipulate DATA FILE (text) stored as varbinary(max) in sql table

Question

Hi, looking for help and need pointing in the right direction, can anyone assist?

Have a data file (txt) that contains 10000 numbers/data points. Storing the data file as varbinary(MAX) in an SQL table.

My goal is to retrieve the file on user request and plot/chart the numbers as a line chart.

No problem in getting DataReader to display the numbers directly to the screen, but I'm stuck as to how get the numbers into a DataSet (or table) to plot a chart....

Can anyone offer advice or give direction?

Many thanks. Miry

Answer 1

I'm assuming that the data points are delimited by new line characters when retrieved from the database.

There's probably a smarter .Net method to help you do it, but a functional, if basic, way of doing this would be something like (in VB .Net - or my rough approximation of it):

'create a new datatable
Dim myDT As New DataTable("DataPoints")

'add a column to the data table (assuming your data is integer)
myDT.Columns.Add("Point", System.Type.GetType("System.Int32"))

'split the string containing the points into an array
dim pointArray as string() = pointString.Split(vbcrlf)

'add the points to the data table
dim s as string
foreach s in pointArray
     myDT.Rows.Add(Int32.Parse(s))
next

This is basic - some error handling would be a good idea - but hopefully it'll get you started.