SQL Bulk Copy in C#

 

Programmers usually need to transfer production data for testing or analyzing. The simplest way to copy lots of data from any resources to SQL Server is BulkCopying. .NET Framework 2.0 contains a class in ADO.NET "System.Data.SqlClient" namespace: SqlBulkCopy. The bulk copy operation usually has two separated phases.

In the first phase you get the source data. The source could be various data platforms such as Access, Excel, SQL.. You must get the source data in your code wrapping it in a DataTable, or any DataReader class which implements IDataReader. After that, in the second phase, you must connect the target SQL Database and perform the bulk copy operation.

The bulk copy operation in .Net is a very fast way to copy large amount of data somewhere to SQL Server. The reason for that is the Bulkcopy Sql Server mechanism. Inserting all data row by row, one after the other is a very time and system resources consuming. But the bulkcopy mechanism process all data at once. So the data inserting becomes very fast.



 That's all. Just a few lines and in a few seconds...

// Establishing connection
SqlConnectionStringBuilder cb = new SqlConnectionStringBuilder(); 
cb.DataSource = "SQLProduction"; 
cb.InitialCatalog = "Sales"; 
cb.IntegratedSecurity = true;
SqlConnection cnn = new SqlConnection(cb.ConnectionString);  

// Getting source data
SqlCommand cmd = new SqlCommand("SELECT * FROM PendingOrders",cnn); 
cnn.Open(); 
SqlDataReader rdr = cmd.ExecuteReader(); 

// Initializing an SqlBulkCopy object
SqlBulkCopy sbc = new SqlBulkCopy("server=.;database=ProductionTest;" +<BR>                                  "Integrated Security=SSPI"); 

// Copying data to destination
sbc.DestinationTableName = "Temp"; 
sbc.WriteToServer(rdr); 

// Closing connection and the others
sbc.Close(); 
rdr.Close(); 
cnn.Close();