Sunday, August 5, 2007

Benchmarking SqlBulkCopy

Bulk uploading into SQL Server programmatically has always been slow and tedious exercise.
Fortunately Microsoft has included SqlBulkCopy in the SqlClient for ADO.NET 2.0

In my testing. I loaded Australia's PostCode list from csv file, consisting of 16,789 rows.
I compared SqlAdapter.Fill(), SqlAdapterFill() + Setting the UpdateBatchSize property, and finally I used SqlBulkCopy.

First I read the csv file into in memory DataTable. For this purpose I read all rows in one go. In real live application, we would need to page the operation.

Then I push the DataTable into SqlServer 2005 table using 3 different methods.
  1. SqlAdapter.Fill
  2. SqlAdapter.Fill + Setting the UpdateBatchSize property = 500
  3. SqlBulkCopy
Option 1 took 11,365 ms
Option 2 took 9,636 ms
and .....
Option 3 took 568 ms

Wow,.....
I suspect that option 1 and option 2 difference would be more significant if the SQL Server is located accross network. In this test I use local SQL Server.

To do SqlBulkCopy is surprisingly simple:
You need only to specify the connection string, the datatable and the name of the destination table.
string connectionString = "....";
DataTable csvTable = PopulateTable();
SqlBulkCopy bcp = new SqlBulkCopy(connectionString );
bcp.DestinationTableName = "PostCodes";
bcp.WriteToServer(csvTable);

Here are snippet of the code from my Benchmark Harness, which is a winforms application