I'm a web developer with a bit of DB experience, but this one is beyond my knowledge.
We're trying to set up a new website. The data - products, prices, descriptions etc - are supplied by an external company in either .XLS, .CSV or XML format. This data is updates & distributed regularly, eg each month.
I could simply import all the data each time - the problem is we don't necessarily need all the products, so we would mark them as "unavailable" or something by creating a new field in the DB.
So, next time the data is provided, I need to import it again - but making sure it doesn't overwrite our "available" field.
My initial thought was to create 2 tables - one, "Products" which I would import the data into each time and a new table "availability" just with 2 fields - product ID and an available - yes/no field and join the tables on the product ID.
Is this a sensible approach? can XML files be read directly from SQL Server without importing?