T-SQL: Import csv in temp table

nospam@example.com (Twan Jacobs) — Wed, 13 Apr 2011 09:55:34 +0000

Seems pretty simple to do... Just execute a query like this one:

SELECT * INTO #TESTCSV
FROM OPENROWSET (
        'Microsoft.Jet.OLEDB.4.0',
        'Text;Database=C:\;HDR=YES',
        'SELECT * FROM test.csv')
 

In my case I was getting the following error message, which got me baffled for quite some time:

Msg 492, Level 16, State 1, Line 1

Duplicate column names are not allowed in result sets obtained through OPENQUERY and OPENROWSET. The column name "test#csv.NoName" is a duplicate.

This really didn't make any sense to me. There were no duplicate column names in the csv file and surely there were no columns named 'NoName', nor did I forget to name a column...

Then it came to me: what if UNICODE isn't parsed correctly? Maybe that could cause empty columns headers? The file was exported by ReportViewer and I had not looked at the encoding of the resulting csv file. Guess what!? The encoding was UNICODE. So, after saving the file in ANSI encoding, the query executed like a charm.

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T-SQL: Import csv in temp table