I got it to work.

No staging table needed.

The trick was to put a very large max-Lenght in the fmt file and set ansi_warnings off.

This worked.

Thanks for all suggestions!

staging stable is not going to work as the length of the data is unknown. it may be 10 characters or 10,000 characters.

I would assume the same restrictions would...

It still doesnt work

I wrote some code to dynamically determin the insert into query:

declare @colName varchar(255)

declare @colType int

declare @colMaxLength varchar(20)

declare @sql varchar(max)

declare @tbl varchar(128)

declare @loadfile varchar(500)

declare @formatFile varchar(500)

declare @vartype int

select...