Question

I have done some research for “The bast way to insert huge data into DB with C#” then a lot of people just suggested me using SqlBulkCopy. After I tried it out and it really amazed me. Undoubtedly, SqlBulkCopy is very very fast. It seems that SqlBulkCopy is a perfect way to insert data (especially huge data). But why dont we use it at all times. Is there any drawback of using SqlBulkCopy?

Answer 1

Two reasons I can think of:

1. As far as I know, it’s only available for Microsoft SQL Server
2. In a lot of normal workloads, you don’t do bulk inserts, but occasional inserts intermixed with selects and updates. Microsoft themselves state that a normal insert is more efficient for that, on the SqlBulkCopy MSDN page.

Note that if you want a SqlBulkCopy to be equivalent to a normal insert, at the very least you’ll have to pass it the SqlBulkCopyOptions.CheckConstraints parameter.