Loading data into a table

The way you can dump a table data into a file, you can do vice-versa, that is, load the data from the file into a table. This is widely used for loading bulk data and is a super fast way to load data into tables. You can specify the column delimiters to load the data into respective columns. You should have the FILE privilege and the INSERT privilege on the table.

How to do it...

Earlier, you have saved first_name and last_name to a file. You can use the same file to load the data into another table. Before loading, you should create the table. If the table already exists, you can directly load. The columns of the table should match the fields of the file.

Create a table to hold the data:

mysql> CREATE TABLE employee_names (
       `first_name` varchar(14) NOT NULL,
       `last_name` varchar(16) NOT NULL
       ) ENGINE=InnoDB;
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.07 sec)

Make sure that the file is present:

shell> sudo ls -lhtr /var/lib/mysql/employees/result.csv
-rw-rw...