They are used to mark a line break in a text file and it is indicated by the “ ” character in the bulk insert statement.Īnother method of importing a CSV file to a table with help of bulk insert is using the FORMAT parameter. But how can we detect a fieldterminator? Open the CSV file in Notepad++ and then navigate to View->Show Symbol->Show All Charters, and then find out the CRLF characters at the end of each field.ĬR = Carriage Return and LF = Line Feed. In the sample CSV file, fieldterminator is very clear and it is a comma (,). It defines the separation character of rows. ROWTERMINATOR does not much differ from FIELDTERMINATOR. SQL Server detects each field in such a way. In the below example, we want to skip column headers so we set this parameter to 2.įIELDTERMINATOR defines the character which separates fields from each other. The FIRSTROW parameter specifies the starting point of the insert statement. Now, we will explain the parameters of the above bulk insert statement. The following BULK INSERT statement imports the CSV file to the Sales table. I placed my sample CSV file on the C: drive and now we will create a table which we will import data from the CSV file. In this first scenario, we will import the CSV file into the destination table in the simplest form.

Import CSV File into SQL Server table Scenario-1: Destination and CSV file have an equal number of columns Download a zip file then unzip the CSV file, and place it in your local drive. In our scenarios, we will use 1.500.000 Sales Records.

You can find the link at the end of the article. Therefore, we will download a sample CSV file from E for Excel website, where you can find various sampled CSV files with a different row number. Preparationīefore starting the samples, we need a sample CSV file. Another advantage of the bulk insert statement is that it offers several parameters which help to determine settings of the bulk insert process.Īt first, we will start a very basic sample and then we will go through various sophisticated scenarios. However, the BULK INSERT statement is much faster and robust than using other methodologies.

we can use bcp ( bulk copy program), SQL Server Import and Export Wizard or SQL Server Integration Service package. Certainly, we can find several import methodologies to handle this CSV file import process, e.g. Assume that our organization has a CSV file of 1.500.000 rows and we want to import this file to a particular table in SQL Server, so we can easily use the BULK INSERT statement in SQL Server. According to Wikipedia, ”A Bulk insert is a process or method provided by a database management system to load multiple rows of data into a database table.” If we adjust this explanation in accordance with the BULK INSERT statement, bulk insert allows importing external data files into SQL Server.

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