Database and development teams often load data from plain text files into their MySQL databases. The files might be used to add lookup data, support test and development environments, populate new MySQL instances, load data from regular feeds, or in other ways support their operations. To help with the import process, MySQL provides the LOAD DATA statement, which reads rows from a text file and inserts them into the target table.
In this article, I show how to use the LOAD DATA statement to add data from comma-separated values (CSV) files and other plain text files. Although the examples are