Create mysql table directly from CSV file using the CSV Storage engine?

Question

I just learned that MySQL has a native CSV storage engine which stores data in a Comma-Separated-Value file per table.

Is it possible to create a table directly from

Answer 1

This is not possible. To create a table you need a table schema. What you have is a data file. A schema cannot be created with it.

What you can do is check if your file has a header row, and, in that case, you can manually create a table using that header row.

However, there is a way to generate a create table statement using a batch file as described by John Swapceinski in the comment section of the MySQL manual.

Posted by John Swapceinski on September 5 2011 5:33am.
Create a table using the .csv file's header:

#!/bin/sh
# pass in the file name as an argument: ./mktable filename.csv
echo "create table $1 ( "
head -1 $1 | sed -e 's/,/ varchar(255),\n/g'
echo " varchar(255) );"