Walkthrough on using MySQL's LOAD DATA command:
Create your table:
CREATE TABLE foo(myid INT, mymessage VARCHAR(255), mydecimal DECIMAL(8,4));
Create your tab delimited file (note there are tabs between the columns):
1 Heart disease kills 1.2
2 one out of every two 2.3
3 people in America. 4.5
Use the load data command:
LOAD DATA LOCAL INFILE '/tmp/foo.txt'
INTO TABLE foo COLUMNS TERMINATED BY '\t';
If you get a warning that this command can't be run, then you have to enable the --local-infile=1 parameter described here: How can I correct MySQL Load Error
The rows get inserted:
Query OK, 3 rows affected (0.00 sec)
Records: 3 Deleted: 0 Skipped: 0 Warnings: 0
Check if it worked:
mysql> select * from foo;
+------+----------------------+-----------+
| myid | mymessage | mydecimal |
+------+----------------------+-----------+
| 1 | Heart disease kills | 1.2000 |
| 2 | one out of every two | 2.3000 |
| 3 | people in America. | 4.5000 |
+------+----------------------+-----------+
3 rows in set (0.00 sec)
How to specify which columns to load your text file columns into:
Like this:
LOAD DATA LOCAL INFILE '/tmp/foo.txt' INTO TABLE foo
FIELDS TERMINATED BY '\t' LINES TERMINATED BY '\n'
(@col1,@col2,@col3) set myid=@col1,mydecimal=@col3;
The file contents get put into variables @col1, @col2, @col3. myid gets column 1, and mydecimal gets column 3. If this were run, it would omit the second row:
mysql> select * from foo;
+------+-----------+-----------+
| myid | mymessage | mydecimal |
+------+-----------+-----------+
| 1 | NULL | 1.2000 |
| 2 | NULL | 2.3000 |
| 3 | NULL | 4.5000 |
+------+-----------+-----------+
3 rows in set (0.00 sec)