DbBulkCopy, Csv and mappings galore

February 06, 2009 Data & AI

As recently as our Connect for ADO.NET 3.2 release, we introduced support for bulk load operations across all of our providers. We are already getting excellent feedback on what we hoped would be our most prominent features, namingly

The DDTek.Data.Common.DbBulkCopy* objects which act as an extension for programmers who want to extend their usage of the common programming model and provider factories. Check here for functional details on a DbBulkCopy, DbBulkCopyColumnMapping (and more) objects. If you've used bulk copy in in ADO.NET this is a nice extension of the established pattern in ADO.NET where SqlBulkCopy originally blazed the trail.

Just as popular is our ability to consume standard CSV files that be either generated/processed automatically (CsvWriter and CsvReader respectively) or by an outside tool using our published schema as a guide. Although, in hindsight, an obvious point of integration, we probably didn't do as a good a job in making it easy to understand how any outside tool would could understand the decisions we took on how we map specific database data types to our common CSV data type.

So to meet this need, I am publishing a range of tables below that show how each database type, or DbType maps to our XML Schema 'dataType' facet.

Jonathan Bruce