In our application we need to load data in SQL Server 2008 as fast as possible. And the way to do that is by bulk loading from files in native format. Now, the data comes from our application so I need to create the file programmatically from my application (I can't use bcp to export it from another data source).
However, I could not find any MS documentation about formatting the native files. Yes, they talk at length about the format files, but there is no reference about how to encode each individual field. A few questions would be: - how are strings encoded? - how are terminator characters escaped? - how are dates encoded?
Does anybody know more about the encoding used for the native file format? Can you point me to some documentation?
Or, would you say that the format is proprietary and it's not supposed to be used by non-MS tools?
Thank you,
Bogdan Calmac.
