Insert 2 million rows into SQL Server quickly

  1. I think its better you read data of text file in DataSet

  2. Try out SqlBulkCopy - Bulk Insert into SQL from C# App

    // connect to SQL
    using (SqlConnection connection = new SqlConnection(connString))
    {
        // make sure to enable triggers
        // more on triggers in next post
        SqlBulkCopy bulkCopy = new SqlBulkCopy(
            connection, 
            SqlBulkCopyOptions.TableLock | 
            SqlBulkCopyOptions.FireTriggers | 
            SqlBulkCopyOptions.UseInternalTransaction,
            null
            );
    
        // set the destination table name
        bulkCopy.DestinationTableName = this.tableName;
        connection.Open();
    
        // write the data in the "dataTable"
        bulkCopy.WriteToServer(dataTable);
        connection.Close();
    }
    // reset
    this.dataTable.Clear();
    

or

after doing step 1 at the top

  1. Create XML from DataSet
  2. Pass XML to database and do bulk insert

you can check this article for detail : Bulk Insertion of Data Using C# DataTable and SQL server OpenXML function

But its not tested with 2 million record, it will do but consume memory on machine as you have to load 2 million record and insert it.


You can try with SqlBulkCopy class.

Lets you efficiently bulk load a SQL Server table with data from another source.

There is a cool blog post about how you can use it.