Re: Problems importing csv files

On Jun 22, 2009, at 19:29, Robert Schnabel <schnabelr@missouri.edu> wrote:

I do a lot of csv importing and exporting on Windows. On my setup I find it much easier to use forward slashes in the file path. I struggled with escaping the normal Windows backslashes but never got it to work. 

As for the error message, when you use the COPY query construct, the postgres service is trying to access the file as the postgres user that was created during install (assuming you didn't change the defaults), not the local or network Windows user you are logged in as. This can lead to some subtle permission denied errors, and as you can see, the error isn't properly descriptive in this case.

A few ways to work around this: 1) use the psql client's \copy command instead, which will run as the local Windows user as you would expect. 2) change the permissions on the folder or file in question so that the postgres user has permission to access the file using the SQL COPY command.

There are a few other ways to work around the problem, but they go against best practices and create problems of their own.

Hope this helps. 

Tim Ryan