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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-21T21:39:48+00:00

Ok so I have been searching the internet for a solution but have not

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Ok so I have been searching the internet for a solution but have not yet come up with anything yet

What I have is a CSV – this CSV could have any number of unknown columns

e.g.

Col 1, Col 2, Col 3

I have used BULK INSERT #temp FROM ... to insert from a CSV but this relies on me having a table before hand to load into – This is where the problem arises – I don’t know my table structure before loading the CSV

Is there a way to dynamically create the table, based on the CSV, on the fly to load the data into?

Thanks
Rob

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    CSV parsing is non-trivial (taking into account text qualifiers, values that contain linebreaks, qualifier escape mechanisms, etc). There are several .Net libraries out there that do all this stuff for you (eg http://www.codeproject.com/KB/database/CsvReader.aspx), so I would think it would be easier to use a different technology, eg powershell, or SQL CLR, to make use of an existing library – rather that trying to roll your own CSV parser in T-SQL…

    Huh, just found this nice and simple solution on an old forum post (http://forums.databasejournal.com/showthread.php?t=47966):

    select * 
from OpenRowset('MSDASQL', 'Driver={Microsoft Text Driver (*.txt; *.csv)}; DefaultDir=D:\;',
'select * from test1.csv')

    Unfortunately, it doesn’t work on recent windows versions where the text driver isn’t installed by default…

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