Bulk Copy Program (BCP)–A simple way to export data in a file TIP#101

 

Let’s consider a scenario where the end user require a CSV file of all the records in a table then BCP is one of the simplest way.

BCP stands for Bulk copy program. By the name you got the feeling of lots of data .

Although, there are various options & parameters available with BCP but here we will talk about simple one .

To understand it more clearly lets consider an example.

I have a database with name “IndiandotnetDB” and in this database I have a table with name tblStudentSource which having few records as shown in below figure

Now, the objective here is to export all the data which is in tblStudentSource table to a CSV file.

to achieve this we will use BCP command.  We are running BCP from command prompt as shown in below figure

Although there are various other options available with BCP command but for current post I choose simple one .

Now let me explain the command

BCP IndiandotnetDb.dbo.tblStudentSource OUT d:\File\output\sampleExport.csv –S . –T –c

so in above command “IndiandotnetDB” is my database

“dbo” is schema

“tblStudentSource” is  a table whose data need to be export

OUT – here out stands for export (export the table or query data)

“D:\File\output\” is folder where I want exported file

“sampleExport.csv” is file name which will be created by BCP and contains entire records after execution of BCP command

-S is stands for server I used “.” for localhost we can provide instance name as well

-T is for trusted connection (we can use – U for username – P for password)

-c is stands for character data type if you are not using this then you have to provide data type for each fields of output query result

Below is the output of the command which we run “ a sampleExport.csv file with all the records”

I hope this simple post will help you some where. I will share more details about BCP command in coming post.

Thanks

RJ!!