Question

Is there any way to use the Bulk Insert statement and disable MAXERRORS?

I would like to allow for an infinite number of errors, as the number of errors can be high in the file I’m bulk inserting (I don’t have control of this file, and am currently working with the vendor to fix their issues on certain rows).

If there isn’t a way to disable it, what is the maximum number that MAXERRORS can handle? Is it 2147483647?

Answer 1

Normally, when I import data from external sources, I am very wary of problems in the data. SQL Server offers several solutions. Many people use SSIS. I avoid SSIS. One of the reasons is getting it to open an Excel file that is already opened by a user. It has a few other shortcomings as well.

In any case, once the data is in a text file, I create a staging table that has all the columns of the original table with the data type varchar(8000). This tends to be larger than necessary, but should be sufficient.

Then, I create a table with the proper columns, and population it using something like:

insert into RealTable (CharColumn, IntColumn, FloatColumn, DateTimeColumn)
    select CharColumn,
           (case when isnumeric(IntColumn) = 1 and IntColumn not like '%.%' then cast(IntColumn as int end),
           (case when isnumeric(FloatColumn) = 1 then cast(FloatColumn as float) end),
           (case when isdate(DateColumn) = 1 then cast(DzteColumn as date)
    from StagingTable st

That is, I do the type checks in SQL code, using a case statement to avoid errors. The result are NULL values when the types don’t match. I can then investigate the values in the database, using the StagingTable, to understand any issues.

Also, in the RealTable, I always have the following columns:

• RealTableId int identity(1,1)
• CreatedBy varchar(255) default system_user,
• CreatedAt datetime default getdate()

These provide tracking information about the data that often comes in useful.