Flat File Source Patterns - SQL Server Integration Services Design Patterns - page 184

Figure 7-3 . The Flat File Connection Manager Editor's Columns page
All data in a flat file are text by default.
Click the OK button to close the Flat File Connection Manager Editor, and then
click the OK button to close the Flat File Source Editor.
Strong-Typing the Data
Why would you want to use strongly typed data? Consider the Value column in our
example. Right now, Value is a DT_STR data type but the column contains numeric
data. In fact, the numeric data is integers. In SQL Server, the INT data type consumes 4
bytes and covers the range from -2^31 (-2,147,483,648) through 2^31 - 1
(2,147,483,647) according to topic Online. If you wanted to store the integer value
-2,147,483,600 as text, this would consume at least 1 byte per character. In this case,
that's a minimum of 11 bytes (not counting the commas), and it could be more bytes