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External File Formats

I look at file formats in Polybase:

Delimited text is exactly as it sounds:  you can use a comma, tab, pipe, tilde, or any other delimiter (including multi-character delimiters).  So let’s go through the options here.  First, FORMAT_TYPE must be DELIMITEDTEXT.  From there, we have a few FORMAT_OPTIONS.  I mentioned FIELD_TERMINATOR, which is how we separate the values in a record.  We can also use STRING_DELIMITER if there are quotes or other markers around our string values.

DATE_FORMAT makes it easier for Polybase to understand how dates are formatted in your file.  The MSDN document gives you hints on how to use specific date formats, but you can’t define a custom format today, or even use multiple date formats.

It feels like there’s a new Hadoop file format every day.