Bulk Loading Text Files With Line Feeds

Steve Jones runs into a scenario in which he wants to bulk load a file not in standard Windows CRLF format:

That’s not good. I suspected this was because of the format of the file, so I added a row terminator.

BULK insert MyTable
from ‘C:\SampleFiles\input.txt’
with ( ROWTERMINATOR = ‘\r’)

That didn’t help. I suspected this was because of the terminators for some reason. I also tried the newline (\n) terminator, and both, but nothing worked.

Since I was worried about formatting, I decided to look at the file. My first choice here is XVI32, and when I opened the file, I could see that only a line feed (0x0A) was used.

Little annoyances like this make me more appreciative of Integration Services (and its mess of little annoyances…).