MySQL can read in 'x' delimited files via something like this: Load data infile csv.txt into TABLE MS SQL may have a similar utility.
Good luck .
-Silent11
Comment on Re: Populating a complex SQL database from a flat file
It's almost a year since I used MySQL, and you're right that it can populate a table with the contents of a flat file, but when I used it it wasn't able to populate multiple tables with complex data structures from one file. As I mentioned in my original post, the file I'm reading is not only tab delimited: some fields also contain multiple values delimited with the '/' character.