Bulk Insert Failure: Unexpected end of file

Question

Hi all,
I have a Bulk Insert task which pulls data from a .csv file to SQL server table.
It works fine 99 out of 100 times, but sometimes it throws the following error in production.
"System exception: An error occurred with the following error message: "Cannot fetch a row from OLE DB provider "BULK" for linked server "(null)".The OLE DB provider "BULK" for linked server "(null)" reported an error. The provider did not give any information
about the error.Bulk load: An unexpected end of file was encountered in the data file.".  "
My Client says that there was no change to the file and it runs fine the next time.Its a error which I could not reproduce in development.
I have an interface prior to this bulk insert interface to check whether the file is completely available(i.e i try to open the file and check whether its used by any other process).
I'm supposed to give an answer for why it fails sometimes. Your thoughts on this?
Rajkumar

Answer 1

The Bulk insert task is used in SSIS package. The error Posted in my first post is what I got from SSIS..
Why don't you use Data Flow task? BULK INSERT is fast, but not much error control.
BOL quote ( http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms141679.aspx ) : "Error Handling in Data
When a data flow component applies a transformation to column data, extracts data from sources, or loads data into destinations, errors can occur. Errors frequently occur because of unexpected data values. For example, a data conversion fails because a column
contains a string instead of a number, an insertion into a database column fails because the data is a date and the column has a numeric data type, or an expression fails to evaluate because a column value is zero, resulting in a mathematical operation that
is not valid.
Errors typically fall into one the following categories:
Data conversion errors, which occur if a conversion results in loss of significant digits, the loss of insignificant digits, and the truncation of strings. Data conversion errors also occur if the requested conversion is not supported.
Expression evaluation errors, which occur if expressions that are evaluated at run time perform invalid operations or become syntactically incorrect because of missing or incorrect data values.
Lookup errors, which occur if a lookup operation fails to locate a match in the lookup table.
Many data flow components support error outputs, which let you control how the component handles row-level errors in both incoming and outgoing data. You specify how the component behaves when truncation or an error occurs by setting options on individual
columns in the input or output. For example, you can specify that the component should fail if customer name data is truncated, but ignore errors on another column that contains less important data."
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms141679.aspx
Kalman Toth SQL SERVER & BI TRAINING