How to read .TXT files in Azure Data Factory?

Question

I'm trying to load data from a file .TXT type to a SQL Data Base by using a Data Flow or Copy Data activity in Azure Data Factory, but I'm not being capable to do it, down below is my try:

File configuration (as you see guys, I'm using the csv option cause' is the unique way that Azure allows me to read it):

Here is the Preview Data shows:

Everything looks fine, but once I use the Data Set in a Data Flow, I get as follow:

It is possible to read a .TXT file with Azure? What I'm doing wrong?

Thanks by the way, hope you can help me, best regards.

Answer 1

Hi @Alan Gutierrez Encizo ,

Welcome to Microsoft Q&A forum and thanks for reaching out here.

You can use either Azure Data Factory Copy activity to copy TXT data as-is to your destination SQL database or Mapping Data flow if you would like to transform your data before loading it to your destination SQL database.

By looking at the Preview data of your copy activity, seems like your TXT file has tab delimited columns, but your dataset configuration has column delimiter as comma(,) which is why your data preview all columns data in a single column.

I would recommend you to please update the dataset configuration with appropriate values for column delimiter, row delimiter and also Escape character and Quote character if you have any in your source data. (Note: You will have to check First row as header if your source file has a header row )

I would recommend you to please refer to this doc for detailed info about how you want to parse the delimited text files or write the data into delimited text format in Azure data factory: Delimited text format in Azure Data Factory and Azure Synapse Analytics

Hope this clarifies. Do let us know if you have further query.

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