Tom,

Thanks. Just keep in mind that you probably want to have a second level validation on a record level. The MD5 technique works fine to detect duplicate imports of an entire file. But it could be dangerous to rely only on this. I'm currently dealing with exactly these kinds of problems. We receive files from SAP that we import into our netting system. We have found that for some reasons, SAP may send the same invoice more than once in different files. These different files are not duplicates. With other words, they have a different fingerprint.

What this really means is that you can safely reject a file with the same fingerprint. Unfortunately the opposite may not be true as in my case.

>Daniel, EXCELLENT post! Thanks for sharing. Think I will use this technique in my data imports as well.
>