Timeout expired with SqlBulkCopy

Question

I'm using SqlBulkCopy to restore tables from xml backups. One of the table backup is ~200MB large and has a lot of records.

I'm having error:

Timeout expired.
The timeout period elapsed prior to completion of the operation or the server
is not responding.

Answer 1

Change the CommandTimeout property of your SqlCommand object.

The Connect Timeout attribute of a connection string determines how long a SqlConnection Object runs before it stops attempting to connect to a server.

Also change the SqlBulkCopy.BulkCopyTimeout Property.

Answer 2

There are two ways to fix this error:

• Increase Timeout by default it is 30 second and 0 means infinite.

     sqlBulkCopy.BulkCopyTimeout = {time in seconds}
  

• Decrease BatchSize by default it try to insert all rows in one batch

      sqlBulkCopy.BatchSize  = {no of rows you want to insert at once}
  

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.data.sqlclient.sqlbulkcopy.batchsize.aspx http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.data.sqlclient.sqlbulkcopy.bulkcopytimeout.aspx

Answer 3

You probably need to increase the timeout. Try increasing the value of sqlBulkCopy.BulkCopyTimeout from the default which is 30 seconds.