Reading a text file with SQL Server

sql-server sql-server-2005 xp-cmdshell
Markus O'Reilly picture Markus O'Reilly · Jan 5, 2010 · Viewed 197.1k times · Source

I am trying to read in a text file from an SQL query (SQL Server 2005) but am not having any luck at all. I've tried various things with EXEC and xp_cmdshell, but all aren't working. This is the general way I've tried to approach this:

CREATE TABLE temp (data varchar(2000));
INSERT temp EXEC master.dbo.xp_cmdshell 'type file.txt';

I then try to select data from the temp table. I've searched around a lot and I can't tell what I'm getting wrong. Help?

Answer

Cain picture Cain · Oct 20, 2011

Just discovered this:

SELECT * FROM OPENROWSET(BULK N'<PATH_TO_FILE>', SINGLE_CLOB) AS Contents

It'll pull in the contents of the file as varchar(max). Replace SINGLE_CLOB with:

SINGLE_NCLOB for nvarchar(max) SINGLE_BLOB for varbinary(max)

Thanks to http://www.mssqltips.com/sqlservertip/1643/using-openrowset-to-read-large-files-into-sql-server/ for this!

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