I am confused whether you can copy records into a *new* table in MonetDB.
The official documentation seems[1] to talk only about copying into existing tables. I have quite a large universe of billions of records in dozens of tables, and I would much prefer a solution that inferred the type from the CSV itself, and the column names from the first rows.
A StackOverflow answer[2] seems to work for SQL Server 2000 with `OpenRowset`, though even they are not concerned about data-type inferencing.
Another answer[3] here on DBA recommends `BCP` before calling `BULK INSERT` in Server 2000, neither of which is discussed in the MonetDB documentation.
Other answers[4] also suggest that this is impossible in MySQL without external scripts.
The background of my issues are that I realized that managing my raw data (which came in text files from government agencies, with scarce documentation) should be separate from the front-end of my analysis still kept in Stata. This is similar to what has been achieved with MonetDB.R (e.g.
hannes.muehleisen.org/SSDBM2013-databases-and-statistics.pdf), though probably limited to an odbc link (so missing some of the real benefits coming from merging and calculations done in MonetDB). That said, this is the only sign of a Stata and MonetDB link I could find:
http://www.stata.com/statalist/archive/2012-08/msg01363.html
Disclaimer: I am an SQL and MonetDB newbie, but thanks for not letting me miss the obvious.