Software:Bulk Copy Program

From HandWiki

Bulk Copy Program[1] (BCP) is a command-line tool used to import or export data against a Microsoft SQL Server or Sybase database. The tool is often more efficient [citation needed] than more recent GUI-based applications, such as DTS, to import and extract data.

Common Uses

Some common uses of BCP are:

  • Stage a raw text file in a table for further data scrubbing.
  • Create a delimited or fixed-width file for exchange with another party.
  • Backup data from a database vendor specific format, to a common text format.

Other platforms

References

  1. "Microsoft SQL Server bcp Utility". Microsoft. April 2010. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms162802.aspx. 
  2. http://docs.oracle.com/cd/B19306_01/server.102/b14220/utility.htm#sthref1799
  3. Gennick, Jonathan; Mishra, Sanjay (2001). Oracle SQL*Loader: The Definitive Guide. Definitive Guide Series. O'Reilly Media, Inc.. p. 14. ISBN 9781565929487. https://books.google.com/books?id=61JoPm_qpkgC. Retrieved 2015-08-13. "On Unix systems, the command used to invoke SQL*Loader is sqlldr. On Windows systems running Oracle8i, release 8.1 or higher, the command is also sqlldr. Prior to release 8.1, the SQL*Loader command on Windows included the first two digits of the Oracle release number [...] sqlldr80 (Oracle8, release 8.0), sqlldr73 (Oracle7, release 7.3), and so forth." 
  4. "MySQL 5.1 LOAD DATA INFILE Documentation". http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/load-data.html. Retrieved 2010-05-31. 
  5. "PostgreSQL 8.1.21 Documentation". http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.1/static/sql-copy.html. Retrieved 2010-05-31.