There are XML and non-XML format files.
Structure of non-XML format files
The first line specifies the version number.
The second line specifies how many columns are described in the format file.
Each of the following lines corresponds to a column.
A column specification consists of eight parts:
| Host file field order | |
| Host file data type | See column Host file data type. |
| Prefix length | Valid values are 0, 1, 2, 4 and 8. 0 can be used to avoid specifying the length prefix, but a value must be supplied if the field contains null values. |
| Host file data length | Maximum length (bytes) of data in respective column |
| Terminator | Delimiter with which field are separated from one another. |
| Server column order | Set to 0 in order to not fill values in respective column. |
| Server column name | The name seems to have no influence, but must not be null. |
| Collation of the column | |
14.0
4
1 SQLCHAR 0 10 "\t" 1 colName_one *
2 SQLCHAR 0 20 "\t" 2 colName_two *
3 SQLCHAR 0 42 "\t" 3 colName_three *
4 SQLCHAR 0 3 "\r\n" 4 colName_four *
Creating a format file
bcp allows to quickly create a format file (whose name is specified with the
-f option) that matches the characteristics of an existing table with
format nul:
bcp tq84_tab format nul -f transfer.fmt -T -d tq84_db -c