Trisha Shetty (Editor)

Bulk Copy Program

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Bulk Copy Program (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 than more recent GUI-based applications, such as DTS, to import and extract data.

Contents

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

  • Oracle uses SQL*LOADER, implemented on the command-line as sqlldr
  • DB2 uses the LOAD/EXPORT commands
  • MySQL uses LOAD DATA INFILE
  • PostgreSQL uses the COPY command

    • References

    Bulk Copy Program Wikipedia
    (Text) CC BY-SA