bulk insert a date in YYYYMM format to date field in MS SQL table

Question

I have a large text file (more than 300 million records). There is a field containing date in YYYYMM format. Target field is of date type and I\'m using MS SQL 2008 R2 serve

Answer 1

Run SET DATEFORMAT ymd before the bulk insert statement

Note that yyyy-mm-dd and yyyy-dd-mm are not safe in SQL Server generally: which causes this. Always use yyyymmdd. For more, see best way to convert and validate a date string (the comments especially highlight misunderstandings here)