Importing Text File to SQL

HI Guys,

I am doing the following to read the data in a text file and inserting it into SQL.

1) Open db connection
2) Open Text File
3) loop through text file all along inserting each row into the db
4) close the text file
5) close the db connection

However, the text file has over 400 rows/lines of data that need to be inserted into the db. Each line in the text file is a row in the db. At anyrate, the above script times out. Is there a better, faster way to do this? I can't use Bulk Insert due to permissions previlages.

Thanks in Advance!DTS would do it. If you can get a DTS pakage set up and a procedure to run it, you can do it by uploading the file to a place the database can see it, and then run the proc that runs the DTS job.

400 rows isn't much. I do a similar thing with up to 100,000 rows. Not an ideal thing, but it was right for the situation. I had to set the timeouts longer, which is what you can do also.

You need to set a longer timeout in three places.

1) server.scripttimeout
2) connection timeout
3) command timeout

Google for examples. 400 is not a lot, so it's not a bad way to do it. If you don't expect that to grow much, just set the timeouts longer and be done with it.|||Hi, I'm new in the programming. I am developing an application that uses text file as input for the data. Therefore, i need to import the text file to SQL server before I could use it. Do you mind if you could share the sample of your code for importing the text file and convert it to sql.

Importing Date Values from a flat file into the database

Hi

I am trying to to import a flat file into a table in my database, i get all the values right except for the date, it keeps on inserting NULL values into the date fields.

The date format in the flat file is '20070708' etc.

Does anyone know what i can do to fix this?

I've tried to change the datatype values that it imports, but it still ignores it and inserts NULL values

Any help will be greatly appreciated

Kind Regards

Carel Greaves

Search this forum for "YYYYMMDD" and you'll find your answer along with examples.

Basically, you need to substring the date field into the various date parts and then assemble a date in the format of perhaps mm/dd/yyyy before converting into a datetime field.|||

Thanks

Importing data & inserting value

I've got a bunch of CSV files (21) which all contain the same fields but are only distinguishable from their file names. I.e. file.001 file.002 etc. I need to collaborate them all into one table on our Datawarehouse. Im currently doing the following:

1. Drop & recreate a temp table with an additional column as a default value based on the corresponding file extension (manually entered into the DTS routine).
2. Import a single file into a temp table.
3. Transfer the temp table data to the permanent table with Keep Null Values ticked.

Ive only got as far as importing 2 of the files (which works!) but is getting messy already with 10 steps so far!

There must be an easy way as a file is being imported to add a value on each row rather then going through all these processes!

Can anyone help?

Thanks in advance!You can use the bcp import utility with a format file. See in BOL for more info on format files.