How can I debug a Bulk Insert error?

Question

I'm loading a bunch of files into SQL server.  All work fine, but one keeps erroring out on me.  All files should be exactly the same in structure, but they have different dates, and other different financial metrics, but the structure and field
names should be exactly the same.  Nevertheless, one keeps konking out, and throwing this error.
Msg 4832, Level 16, State 1, Line 1
Bulk load: An unexpected end of file was encountered in the data file.
Msg 7399, Level 16, State 1, Line 1
The OLE DB provider "BULK" for linked server "(null)" reported an error. The provider did not give any information about the error.
Msg 7330, Level 16, State 2, Line 1
Cannot fetch a row from OLE DB provider "BULK" for linked server "(null)".
The ROWTERMINATOR should be CRLF, and when you look at it in Notepad++ that's what it looks like, but it must be something else, because I keep getting errors here.  I tried the good old:  ROWTERMINATOR='0x0a'
That works on all files, but one, so there's something funky going on here, and I need to see what SQL Server is really doing.
Is there some way to print out a log, or look at a log somewhere?
Thanks!!
Knowledge is the only thing that I can give you, and still retain, and we are both better off for it.

Answer 1

The first thing to try is to see if BCP likes the file. BCP and BULK INSERT adhere to the same spec, but they are different implementations, but there are subtle differences.
There is an ERRORFILE option, but it more helps when there is bad data.
You can also use the BATCHSIZE option to see how many records in the file it swallows, before things go bad. FIRSTROW and LASTROW can also help.
All in all, it can be quite tedious find that single row where things are different - and where BULK INSERT loses sync entirely. Keep in mind that it reads fields on by one, and it there is one field terminator to few on a line, it will consume the line
feed at the end of the line as data.
Erland Sommarskog, SQL Server MVP, [email protected]