Win has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Dear Monks,

I am used to populating MySQL tables with text files on the Linux command line. How do I do it for MS SQL Server and Perl DBI. Does anyone have any code they can share with explanations?

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Importing text files with DBI
by mpeppler (Vicar) on Nov 24, 2003 at 18:49 UTC
    Something like this could work, assuming a single SQL statememt per file: 
    use strict;

my $dbh = DBI->connect('dbi:...', 'user', 'pwd');
foreach my $file (@ARGV) {
    open(IN, $file) || die "Can't open $file: $!";
    my $sql = join(' ', <IN>);
    close(IN);
    my $sth = $dbh->prepare($sql);
    $sth->execute() || die $sth->errstr;
    # Maybe you need to fetch rows here?
    while(my $d = $sth->fetch) {
        print "@$d\n";
    }
}

    [download]
    The above is obviously very minimal (and untested) - and it you have more than one SQL statement per file you need to figure out a way to break the file into SQL statements.

    Of course you could also simply use MS-SQL's isql.exec command-line tool to run the statements...

    Michael

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Re: Importing text files with DBI
by dragonchild (Archbishop) on Nov 24, 2003 at 18:48 UTC
    What kind of text files? What kind of validation? Are there any foreign keys? What about column name specifications?

    In other words, you need to be a little more specific with your question. What kind of ideas do you have? What do you think should be done?

    ------
    We are the carpenters and bricklayers of the Information Age.

    The idea is a little like C++ templates, except not quite so brain-meltingly complicated. -- TheDamian, Exegesis 6

    ... strings and arrays will suffice. As they are easily available as native data types in any sane language, ... - blokhead, speaking on evolutionary algorithms

    Please remember that I'm crufty and crochety. All opinions are purely mine and all code is untested, unless otherwise specified.

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Re: Importing text files with DBI
by Art_XIV (Hermit) on Nov 24, 2003 at 18:53 UTC

    You can still use the command line to import into SQL Server (if you want). Check your docs for the bcp (bulk copy) utility.

    Hanlon's Razor - "Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity"
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Re: Importing text files with DBI
by RockM66 (Novice) on Nov 23, 2013 at 16:39 UTC

    Curious if there are modules to import delimnited text into, say, mysql (didn't find much on CPAN). Something like this, where $dbh is a DBI object linked to some database:

    $schema=<<EOF;
`Name` VARCHAR(32) PRIMARY KEY,
`Address` VARCHAR(256) NOT NULL,
`Phone` VARCHAR(16) NOT NULL,
`Comment` VARCHAR(80)
EOF

importTextIntoDBI(
    $dbh,
    'myTable.txt',
    delimiter=>"\t",
    tableName=>'myTable',
    schema=>$schema,
    firstline=>2, # Skip header
    checkMissing=>[0..2], # Make sure first 3 columns are not missing,
    checkPattern=>[undef,undef,$phoneRegexp,under] # Check formats
);

    [download]

    There's Text::Delimited for example, but I didn't see support for missing values and format checking. Maybe there are other modules that do the parsing, checking, etc, on a delimited file to create a "clean" object that's ready to be imported into DBI?

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