BULK INSERT problem with SQL Server 2008 DATE format

Gawiz

SQL Server 2008 has the new 3-byte DATE format that I would like to use, being as I don't need the extra overhead of storing TIME. I used bcp to generate the following format file from my table definition: "<?xml version="1.0"?> <BCPFORMAT xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/sqlserver/2004/bulkload/format" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"> <RECORD> <FIELD ID="1" xsi:type="CharTerm" TERMINATOR="\t" MAX_LENGTH="10" COLLATION="SQL_Latin1_General_CP1_CI_AS"/> <FIELD ID="2" xsi:type="CharTerm" TERMINATOR="\r\n" MAX_LENGTH="11"/> </RECORD> <ROW> <COLUMN SOURCE="1" NAME="Symbol" xsi:type="SQLVARYCHAR"/> <COLUMN SOURCE="2" NAME="myDate" xsi:type="SQLDATE"/> </ROW> </BCPFORMAT>" xsi:type="SQLDATE" is used to define the transformation for the date in my ascii file to the DATE in the table. A snippet from the input file is: AAI 19940101 ACL 19981231 AKA 20091208 BULK INSERT interprets all of these dates to be 1900-01-01, which would be the default value I suppose. But if I change my input file to: AAI 1994-01-01 ACL 1998-12-31 AKA 2009-12-08 BULK INSERT inserts the correct date values into my table. This is peculiar because if I define the table to be SMALLDATETIME instead of DATE and SQLDATETIM4 instead of SQLDATE, then either input file works OK. It wouldn't be such a big issue for me except that I have thousands of files each with thousands of rows and converting them all before importing is going to be time consuming. I think this is a bug in SS2008. I tried to report it to Microsoft, but to open a support ticket costs $99:confused: 1) Is there a free/simple way to report the bug to Microsoft 2) Is there an updated version of bcp.exe (I can't find one) 3) Is there a workaround that doesn't involve pre-formatting the input Thanks Steve

Lost User

Gawiz wrote:

Is there a free/simple way to report the bug to Microsoft

Microsoft Connect[^]?

Gawiz wrote:

Is there a workaround that doesn't involve pre-formatting the input

Converting the results, by importing into the SMALLDATETIME and SQLDATETIM4 types and ALTERing the columntype afterwards.

I are Troll :suss: