BULK INSERT with identity (auto-increment) column

Don't BULK INSERT into your real tables directly.

I would always

1. insert into a staging table dbo.Employee_Staging (without the IDENTITY column) from the CSV file
2. possibly edit / clean up / manipulate your imported data

3. and then copy the data across to the real table with a T-SQL statement like:

   INSERT INTO dbo.Employee(Name, Address) 
      SELECT Name, Address
      FROM dbo.Employee_Staging
   

I had a similar issue, but I needed to be sure that the order of the ID is aligning to the order in the source file. My solution is using a VIEW for the BULK INSERT:

Keep your table as it is and create this VIEW (select everything except the ID column)

CREATE VIEW [dbo].[VW_Employee]
AS
SELECT [Name], [Address]
FROM [dbo].[Employee];

Your BULK INSERT should then look like:

BULK INSERT [dbo].[VW_Employee] FROM 'path\tempFile.csv ' 
WITH (FIRSTROW = 2,FIELDTERMINATOR = ',' , ROWTERMINATOR = '\n');

Add an id column to the csv file and leave it blank:

id,Name,Address
,name1,addr test 1
,name2,addr test 2

Remove KEEPIDENTITY keyword from query:

BULK INSERT Employee  FROM 'path\tempFile.csv ' 
WITH (FIRSTROW = 2,FIELDTERMINATOR = ',' , ROWTERMINATOR = '\n');

The id identity field will be auto-incremented.

If you assign values to the id field in the csv, they'll be ignored unless you use the KEEPIDENTITY keyword, then they'll be used instead of auto-increment.