We will be working with the use case from the previous chapter, the solution for Reliable Payroll Pro Inc.—also known as RPP. Refer to Chapter 3, The SQL Server Primer, for the full details of this use case.
To briefly refresh your memory, we were building a system to process payroll data from the various sources and clients of RPP. We built a solution using the capabilities of MS SQL Server alone. We created SQL scheduled tasks that are running T-SQL scripts to import data from Excel spreadsheets into the RPP database and process it as required.
Let's imagine that we have an additional requirement in our use case. We made a tacit assumption that our scripts would work because the input data filenames would be the same each and every time. Now, it appears that this is not how RPP wants it to happen. For RPP, saving the datafiles into a location where SQL Server can find them is a manual task. RPP employees receive...