DSXchange

Amazing! It's actually in the manual too!

Can Metadata Workbench automated services be triggered from a command line and, if so, which command (and, ideally, where is it documented)?

In any version that has stage variables you can do it in Transformer stage.

Nothing. You've asked what I suspect to be an already heavily-loaded system to do more work.

You don't.

But if you can use a Connector stage type, you can reduce the fatal metadata mismatch error to a warning.

Only from partitioned tables does this stage read in parallel; you need to set the partition table property in the stage.

Vertical pivot to get all addresses into a single record, then choose the first non null one using an expression, probably involving If..Then..Else.

You have conflicting requirements - sparse lookup and fast performance.

What have you attempted?

Any way you like.

For example, to test for the existence of a file use an Execute Command activity to execute the test command and test its exit status (via the appropriate activity variable for the activity).

assuming you're counting from 1.

If you give a man a fish he'll be fed briefly. If you teach a man to fish, he need never be hungry.

XML is by its very nature free format, so I ask "why bother"?

There are lots of XML-prettifying tools out there, so why insist on using the wrong tool (DataStage)?

I agree with your summary.

Check that the machine has been correctly recorded in Yellow Pages