Write Large Pandas DataFrames to SQL Server database

This just recently been updated as of SQLAchemy ver: 1.3.0 just in case anyone else needs to know. Should make your dataframe.to_sql statement much faster.

https://docs.sqlalchemy.org/en/latest/changelog/migration_13.html#support-for-pyodbc-fast-executemany

engine = create_engine( "mssql+pyodbc://scott:tiger@mssql2017:1433/test?driver=ODBC+Driver+13+for+SQL+Server", fast_executemany=True)

I've got some sad news for you, SQLAlchemy actually doesn't implement bulk imports for SQL Server, it's actually just going to do the same slow individual INSERT statements that to_sql is doing. I would say that your best bet is to try and script something up using the bcp command line tool. Here is a script that I've used in the past, but no guarantees:

from subprocess import check_output, call
import pandas as pd
import numpy as np
import os

pad = 0.1
tablename = 'sandbox.max.pybcp_test'
overwrite=True
raise_exception = True
server = 'P01'
trusted_connection= True
username=None
password=None
delimiter='|'
df = pd.read_csv('D:/inputdata.csv', encoding='latin', error_bad_lines=False)



def get_column_def_sql(col):
   if col.dtype == object:
      width = col.str.len().max() * (1+pad)
      return '[{}] varchar({})'.format(col.name, int(width)) 
   elif np.issubdtype(col.dtype, float):
      return'[{}] float'.format(col.name) 
   elif np.issubdtype(col.dtype, int):
      return '[{}] int'.format(col.name) 
   else:
      if raise_exception:
         raise NotImplementedError('data type {} not implemented'.format(col.dtype))
      else:
         print('Warning: cast column {} as varchar; data type {} not implemented'.format(col, col.dtype))
         width = col.str.len().max() * (1+pad)
         return '[{}] varchar({})'.format(col.name, int(width)) 

def create_table(df, tablename, server, trusted_connection, username, password, pad):         
    if trusted_connection:
       login_string = '-E'
    else:
       login_string = '-U {} -P {}'.format(username, password)

    col_defs = []
    for col in df:
       col_defs += [get_column_def_sql(df[col])]

    query_string = 'CREATE TABLE {}\n({})\nGO\nQUIT'.format(tablename, ',\n'.join(col_defs))       
    if overwrite == True:
       query_string = "IF OBJECT_ID('{}', 'U') IS NOT NULL DROP TABLE {};".format(tablename, tablename) + query_string


    query_file = 'c:\\pybcp_tempqueryfile.sql'
    with open (query_file,'w') as f:
       f.write(query_string)

    if trusted_connection:
       login_string = '-E'
    else:
       login_string = '-U {} -P {}'.format(username, password)

    o = call('sqlcmd -S {} {} -i {}'.format(server, login_string, query_file), shell=True)
    if o != 0:
       raise BaseException("Failed to create table")
   # o = call('del {}'.format(query_file), shell=True)


def call_bcp(df, tablename):   
    if trusted_connection:
       login_string = '-T'
    else:
       login_string = '-U {} -P {}'.format(username, password)
    temp_file = 'c:\\pybcp_tempqueryfile.csv'

    #remove the delimiter and change the encoding of the data frame to latin so sql server can read it
    df.loc[:,df.dtypes == object] = df.loc[:,df.dtypes == object].apply(lambda col: col.str.replace(delimiter,'').str.encode('latin'))
    df.to_csv(temp_file, index = False, sep = '|', errors='ignore')
    o = call('bcp sandbox.max.pybcp_test2 in c:\pybcp_tempqueryfile.csv -S "localhost" -T -t^| -r\n -c')