Bulk insert using stored procedure

Question

I have a query which is working fine:

BULK INSERT ZIPCodes 
FROM  \'e:\\5-digit Commercial.csv\' 
WITH 
( 
     FIRSTROW = 2 ,
    FIELDTERMINATOR = \',\', 
         


        

Answer 1

There's nothing wrong with your stored procedure code - the point is: the BULK INSERT command cannot accept a file name as a variable.

This does work:

BULK INSERT ZIPCodes 
FROM  'e:\5-digit Commercial.csv' 
WITH 

but this never works - within a stored proc or not:

DECLARE @filename VARCHAR(255)
SET @filename = 'e:\5-digit Commercial.csv' 

BULK INSERT ZIPCodes 
FROM @filename
WITH 

So you just cannot do it this way, unfortunately. You could consider building up your BULK INSERT statement as a string (with a fixed file name) and then execute it as dynamic SQL - but I don't really see any other solution.

DECLARE @filepath nvarchar(500)
SET @filepath = N'e:\5-digit Commercial.csv'

DECLARE @bulkinsert NVARCHAR(2000)

SET @bulkinsert = 
       N'BULK INSERT ZIPCodes FROM ''' + 
       @filepath + 
       N''' WITH (FIRSTROW = 2, FIELDTERMINATOR = '','', ROWTERMINATOR = ''\n'')'

EXEC sp_executesql @bulkinsert