Why no bulk insert?

Could someone from DASP explain to me why bulk insert is not allowed? Is it a performance thing? Security? I'd love to be able to bulk insert from a large XML file, then use SQL Server functionality to move the data from that big XML blob into regular tables, but can't do it and doing multiple inserts is just SLOW!

 

It is mainly a performance issue. You will usually find that bulk insert or load data infile (MySQL) are not allowed on shared db servers. Two or three (or 20) users simultaneously dumping large amounts of data at high speeds - it's kind of a recipe for "how to slow a db server to a painful crawl." Not to mention various other unpleasant problems that could arise when dumping large amounts of data into quota restricted databases. For instance, someone repeatedly trying to dump a 600MB data file into a database with a 500MB quota... "Why does this keep failing! I guess I'll just have to try again."

So yeah, I know it's no fun trying to insert large amounts of data, but there are some scripts out there that will read your data file, break it into small chunks and systematically insert them. Couldn't point you to anything specific at the moment, but they are out there.