Question

I am looking for a quick-and-dirty way to import CSV files into SQL Server without having to create the table beforehand and define its columns.

Each imported CSV would be imported into its own table.

We are not concerned about data-type inferencing. The CSV vary in structure and layout, and all of them have many many columns, yet we are only concerned with a few of them: street addresses and zipcodes. We just want to get the CSV data into the SQL database quickly and extract the relevant columns.

I’d like to supply the FieldTerminator and RowTerminator, point it at the CSV, and have the utility do the rest. Is there any way to create the table and populate it, all in one step, using BULK INSERT and/or OpenRowset(BULK … ) ?

Answer 1

Referencing SQLServerPedia, I think this will work:

sp_configure 'show advanced options', 1;
RECONFIGURE;
GO
sp_configure 'Ad Hoc Distributed Queries', 1;
RECONFIGURE;
GO

select TerritoryID
      ,TotalSales
      ,TotalCost
INTO CSVImportTable
from openrowset('MSDASQL'
               ,'Driver={Microsoft Access Text Driver (*.txt, *.csv)}'
               ,'select * from C:\csvtest.CSV')