I can’t seem to figure out how this is happening.
Here’s an example of the file that I’m attempting to bulk insert into SQL server 2005:
***A NICE HEADER HERE***
0000001234|SSNV|00013893-03JUN09
0000005678|ABCD|00013893-03JUN09
0000009112|0000|00013893-03JUN09
0000009112|0000|00013893-03JUN09
Here’s my bulk insert statement:
BULK INSERT sometable
FROM 'E:filefromabove.txt
WITH
(
FIRSTROW = 2,
FIELDTERMINATOR= '|',
ROWTERMINATOR = 'n'
)
But, for some reason the only output I can get is:
0000005678|ABCD|00013893-03JUN09
0000009112|0000|00013893-03JUN09
0000009112|0000|00013893-03JUN09
The first record always gets skipped, unless I remove the header altogether and don’t use the FIRSTROW parameter. How is this possible?
Thanks in advance!
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Answer
I don’t think you can skip rows in a different format with BULK INSERT
/BCP
.
When I run this:
TRUNCATE TABLE so1029384
BULK INSERT so1029384
FROM 'C:Datatestso1029384.txt'
WITH
(
--FIRSTROW = 2,
FIELDTERMINATOR= '|',
ROWTERMINATOR = 'n'
)
SELECT * FROM so1029384
I get:
col1 col2 col3
-------------------------------------------------- -------------------------------------------------- --------------------------------------------------
***A NICE HEADER HERE***
0000001234 SSNV 00013893-03JUN09
0000005678 ABCD 00013893-03JUN09
0000009112 0000 00013893-03JUN09
0000009112 0000 00013893-03JUN09
It looks like it requires the ‘|’ even in the header data, because it reads up to that into the first column – swallowing up a newline into the first column. Obviously if you include a field terminator parameter, it expects that every row MUST have one.
You could strip the row with a pre-processing step. Another possibility is to select only complete rows, then process them (exluding the header). Or use a tool which can handle this, like SSIS.