Click here to Skip to main content
65,938 articles
CodeProject is changing. Read more.
Articles / database / SQL-Server

Inserting Bulk Data in SQL Server from Text file

2.00/5 (8 votes)
1 Jul 2009CPOL 59.1K  
Inserting Bulk Data in SQL Server from Text file
bulkinsert.JPG

Introduction

This article is simple one for inserting bulk data from text file in to sql server by using a simple query. 

Prerequisite 

SQL Server 2005

Description

Actually in my blog, one guy asked me how to insert bulk data’s in to sql server 2005.  When I tried to answer him I just wrote this article. There is a simple query to do this.

Here with I have given the query for creating a sample table and query for inserting bulk data from text file. 

Query

The query for creating table,
CREATE TABLE Employee
(
 FName varchar (100) NOT NULL,
 LName varchar (100) NOT NULL,
 Email varchar (100) NOT NULL
)


//Then we have a text file with the bulk datas like as follows,
 vinoth,kumar,itvinoth83@gmail.com
emp1FName,emp1LName,emp1@company.com
emp2FName,emp2LName,emp2@company.com
emp3FName,emp3LName,emp3@company.com
emp4FName,emp4LName,emp4@company.com
emp5FName,emp5LName,emp5@company.com
emp6FName,emp6LName,emp6@company.com
emp7FName,emp7LName,emp7@company.com
emp8FName,emp8LName,emp8@company.com
emp9FName,emp9LName,emp9@company.com
emp10FName,emp10LName,emp10@company.com
emp11FName,emp11LName,emp11@company.com
emp12FName,emp12LName,emp12@company.com
//Now the query for inserting bulk data is, 
BULK INSERT Employee FROM 'c:\bulktext.txt' WITH (FIELDTERMINATOR = ',')

//Now you can see the data's inserted in table by the select query as follows,

select * from Employee 

Conclusion

Hence we are inserting the bulk data’s in to sql server by using a simple query. The thing is that we need to keep a formatted text file with appropriate data’s to insert.

License

This article, along with any associated source code and files, is licensed under The Code Project Open License (CPOL)