The driver supports DataDirect Bulk Load, a feature that allows your application to send large numbers of rows of data to a database. Similar to batch operations, using bulk load improves performance because far fewer network round trips are required. Bulk load bypasses the data parsing usually done by the database, providing an additional performance gain over batch operations.
Bulk load operations are accomplished by exporting the results of a query from a database into a comma-separated value (CSV) file, a bulk load data file. The driver then loads the data from bulk load data file into a different database. The file can be used by DataDirect OpenAccess ODBC drivers. In addition, the bulk load data file is supported by other DataDirect Connect product lines that feature bulk loading, for example, a DataDirect Connect forODBC or ADO.NET data provider that supports bulk load.
Suppose that you had customer data on one data source and need to export it to a second data source. The driver would perform the following steps:
1. Application using OpenAccess ODBC driver sends query to and receives results from the first data source.
2. Driver exports results to bulk load data file.
3. Driver retrieves results from bulk load data file.
4. Driver bulk loads results on second server.
Important: A bulk load operation may bypass data integrity checks, your application must ensure that the data it is transferring does not violate integrity constraints in the database. For example, suppose you are bulk loading data into a database table and some of that data duplicates data stored as a primary key, which must be unique. The driver will not throw an exception to alert you to the error; your application must provide its own data integrity checks.
