Inserting Data from a CSV File

This guide covers inserting data from CSV files into SQream DB using the COPY FROM method.

In this topic:

1. Prepare CSVs 

Prepare the source CSVs, with the following requirements:

Files should be a valid CSV. By default, SQream DB’s CSV parser can handle RFC 4180 standard CSVs , but can also be modified to support non-standard CSVs (with multi-character delimiters, unquoted fields, etc).
Files are UTF-8 or ASCII encoded
Field delimiter is an ASCII character or characters
Record delimiter, also known as a new line separator, is a Unix-style newline (\n), DOS-style newline (\r\n), or Mac style newline (\r).
Fields are optionally enclosed by double-quotes, or mandatory quoted if they contain one of the following characters:
- The record delimiter or field delimiter
- A double quote character
- A newline
If a field is quoted, any double quote that appears must be double-quoted (similar to the string literals quoting rules. For example, to encode What are "birds"?, the field should appear as "What are ""birds""?".

Other modes of escaping are not supported (e.g. 1,"What are \"birds\"?" is not a valid way of escaping CSV values).
NULL values can be marked in two ways in the CSV:
- An explicit null marker. For example, col1,\N,col3
- An empty field delimited by the field delimiter. For example, col1,,col3
Note

If a text field is quoted but contains no content ("") it is considered an empty text field. It is not considered NULL.

2. Place CSVs where SQream DB workers can access 

During data load, the COPY FROM command can run on any worker (unless explicitly speficied with the Workload Manager). It is important that every node has the same view of the storage being used - meaning, every SQream DB worker should have access to the files.

For files hosted on NFS, ensure that the mount is accessible from all servers.
For HDFS, ensure that SQream DB servers can access the HDFS name node with the correct user-id. See our Using SQream in an HDFS Environment guide for more information.
For S3, ensure network access to the S3 endpoint. See our Inserting Data Using Amazon S3 guide for more information.

3. Figure out the table structure 

Prior to loading data, you will need to write out the table structure, so that it matches the file structure.

For example, to import the data from nba.csv, we will first look at the file:

nba.csv
Name	Team	Number	Position	Age	Height	Weight	College	Salary
Avery Bradley	Boston Celtics	0.0	PG	25.0	6-2	180.0	Texas	7730337.0
Jae Crowder	Boston Celtics	99.0	SF	25.0	6-6	235.0	Marquette	6796117.0
John Holland	Boston Celtics	30.0	SG	27.0	6-5	205.0	Boston University
R.J. Hunter	Boston Celtics	28.0	SG	22.0	6-5	185.0	Georgia State	1148640.0
Jonas Jerebko	Boston Celtics	8.0	PF	29.0	6-10	231.0		5000000.0
Amir Johnson	Boston Celtics	90.0	PF	29.0	6-9	240.0		12000000.0
Jordan Mickey	Boston Celtics	55.0	PF	21.0	6-8	235.0	LSU	1170960.0
Kelly Olynyk	Boston Celtics	41.0	C	25.0	7-0	238.0	Gonzaga	2165160.0
Terry Rozier	Boston Celtics	12.0	PG	22.0	6-2	190.0	Louisville	1824360.0

The file format in this case is CSV, and it is stored as an S3 object.
The first row of the file is a header containing column names.
The record delimiter was a DOS newline (\r\n).
The file is stored on S3, at s3://sqream-demo-data/nba.csv.

We will make note of the file structure to create a matching CREATE TABLE statement.

CREATE TABLE nba
(
   Name text(40),
   Team text(40),
   Number tinyint,
   Position text(2),
   Age tinyint,
   Height text(4),
   Weight real,
   College text(40),
   Salary float
 );

4. Bulk load the data with COPY FROM 

The CSV is a standard CSV, but with two differences from SQream DB defaults:

The record delimiter is not a Unix newline (\n), but a Windows newline (\r\n)
The first row of the file is a header containing column names, which we’ll want to skip.

COPY nba
   FROM 's3://sqream-demo-data/nba.csv'
   WITH RECORD DELIMITER '\r\n'
        OFFSET 2;

Repeat steps 3 and 4 for every CSV file you want to import.

Loading different types of CSV files 

COPY FROM contains several configuration options. See more in the COPY FROM elements section.

Loading a standard CSV file from a local filesystem 

COPY table_name FROM '/home/rhendricks/file.csv';

Loading a PSV (pipe separated value) file 

COPY table_name FROM '/home/rhendricks/file.psv' WITH DELIMITER '|';

Loading a TSV (tab separated value) file 

COPY table_name FROM '/home/rhendricks/file.tsv' WITH DELIMITER '\t';

Loading a text file with non-printable delimiter 

In the file below, the separator is DC1, which is represented by ASCII 17 decimal or 021 octal.

COPY table_name FROM 'file.txt' WITH DELIMITER E'\021';

Loading a text file with multi-character delimiters 

In the file below, the separator is '|.

COPY table_name FROM 'file.txt' WITH DELIMITER '''|';

Loading files with a header row 

Use OFFSET to skip rows.

Note

When loading multiple files (e.g. with wildcards), this setting affects each file separately.

COPY  table_name FROM 'filename.psv' WITH DELIMITER '|' OFFSET  2;

Loading files formatted for Windows (`\r\n`)

COPY table_name FROM 'filename.psv' WITH DELIMITER '|' RECORD DELIMITER '\r\n';

Loading a file from a public S3 bucket 

Note

The bucket must be publicly available and objects can be listed

COPY nba FROM 's3://sqream-demo-data/nba.csv' WITH OFFSET 2 RECORD DELIMITER '\r\n';

Loading files from an authenticated S3 bucket 

COPY nba FROM 's3://secret-bucket/*.csv' WITH OFFSET 2 RECORD DELIMITER '\r\n' AWS_ID '12345678' AWS_SECRET 'super_secretive_secret';

Loading files from an HDFS storage 

COPY nba FROM 'hdfs://hadoop-nn.piedpiper.com/rhendricks/*.csv' WITH OFFSET 2 RECORD DELIMITER '\r\n';

Saving rejected rows to a file 

See Unsupported Field Delimiters for more information about the error handling capabilities of COPY FROM.

COPY  table_name FROM 'filename.psv'  WITH DELIMITER '|'
                                      ERROR_LOG  '/temp/load_error.log' -- Save error log
                                      ERROR_VERBOSITY 0; -- Only save rejected rows

Stopping the load if a certain amount of rows were rejected 

COPY  table_name  FROM  'filename.csv'   WITH  delimiter  '|'
                                         ERROR_LOG  '/temp/load_err.log' -- Save error log
                                         OFFSET 2 -- skip header row
                                         LIMIT  100 -- Only load 100 rows
                                         STOP AFTER 5 ERRORS; -- Stop the load if 5 errors reached

Load CSV files from a set of directories 

Use glob patterns (wildcards) to load multiple files to one table.

COPY table_name  from  '/path/to/files/2019_08_*/*.csv';

Rearrange destination columns 

When the source of the files does not match the table structure, tell the COPY command what the order of columns should be

COPY table_name (fifth, first, third) FROM '/path/to/files/*.csv';

Note

Any column not specified will revert to its default value or NULL value if nullable

Loading non-standard dates 

If files contain dates not formatted as ISO8601, tell COPY how to parse the column. After parsing, the date will appear as ISO8601 inside SQream DB.

In this example, date_col1 and date_col2 in the table are non-standard. date_col3 is mentioned explicitly, but can be left out. Any column that is not specified is assumed to be ISO8601.

COPY table_name FROM '/path/to/files/*.csv' WITH PARSERS 'date_col1=YMD,date_col2=MDY,date_col3=default';

Tip

The full list of supported date formats can be found under the Supported date formats section of the COPY FROM reference.