Specifying a COPY Parser

By default, COPY uses the DELIMITER parser to load raw data into the database. Raw input data must be in UTF-8, delimited text format. Data is compressed and encoded for efficient storage.

If the raw data to load does not consist primarily of delimited text, specify the parser that is most appropriate, one of the following:

• NATIVE (binary)
• NATIVE VARCHAR
• FIXEDWIDTH
• ORC and PARQUET (see Reading Hadoop Columnar File Formats)

Using a different parser for your data can improve load performance. If delimited input data includes binary data types, COPY translates the data on input. See Using Load Scripts and Loading Binary (Native) Data for examples. You can also load binary data, but only if it adheres to the COPY format requirements, described in Creating Native Binary Format Files.

The same bulk load COPY statement cannot mix raw data types that require different parsers, such as NATIVE and FIXEDWIDTH. For information about verifying input data formats, see Checking Data Format Before or After Loading.

Flex Table Parsers

You can use flex parsers to load data into standard, columnar tables. Use the flex parser that best matches your needs, as described in the Using Flex Table Parsers section of Using Flex Tables: 

• FAVROPARSER
• FCEFPARSER
• FCSVPARSER
• FDELIMITEDPARSER
• FDELIMITEDPAIRPARSER
• FJSONPARSER
• FREGEXPARSER

Loading data with the flex parsers makes loading data flexible. For example, you can load JSON data into a columnar table in one load with the FJSONPARSER, and delimited data into the same table in another with the default COPY parser. Using Flex Tables describes this use case and presents an example.

Specifying Load Metadata

In addition to choosing a parser option, COPY supports other options to determine how to handle raw data. These options are considered load metadata, and you can specify metadata options in different parts of the COPY statement as follows:

	Qualifies:
Metadata option	Column expression	COLUMN OPTION	FROM options
DELIMITER	Y	Y	Y
ENCLOSED BY	Y	Y	Y
ESCAPE AS	Y	Y	Y
NULL	Y	Y	Y
TRIM	Y		Y
RECORD TERMINATOR			Y
SKIP			Y
SKIP BYTES			Y (fixed-width only)
TRAILING NULLCOLS			Y

The following precedence rules apply to all data loads:

• All column-level parameters override statement-level parameters.
• COPY uses the statement-level parameter if you do not specify a column-level parameter.
• COPY uses the default metadata values for the DELIMITER, ENCLOSED BY, ESCAPE AS, and NULLoptions if you do not specify them at either the statement or column level.

When you specify any metadata options, COPY uses the parser to produce the best results and stores the raw data and its corresponding metadata in the following formats:

Raw data format	Metadata format	Parser
UTF-8	UTF-8	DELIMITER
Binary	Binary	NATIVE
UTF-8	Binary	NATIVE VARCHAR
UTF-8	UTF-8	FIXEDWIDTH