Microsoft® SQL Server™ 2000 DBA Survival Guide, Second Edition

Common BCP Traps

Be on the lookout for the following traps. They always seem to be lurking out there.

• Invalid dates— When importing data, a data file that contains dates represented as 00/00/00 and 000000 will fail. These are invalid SQL Server date formats. This problem often arises when data is transferred from a mainframe system to SQL Server. You must adhere to SQL Server date formats when importing date information into datetime columns.

• Space-filled dates— When importing spaces into a datetime column, SQL Server defaults the column to 1/1/1900. This is probably not what you want! To avoid this problem, do not pad the column with any data; just follow the column with a delimiter. SQL Server sets the data column to NULL, which is presumably ...