SQL read text from a file

Consider the following scenario: Your database has a table called Customer (who doesn't these days) with millions of rows (lucky you). You production support team just called you in the middle of the night with a live site issue - Around 10,000 customers are getting a message that their logins have been disabled. And they send you a text file with 10,000 customer id's :-)

Great! Now you need to look these customers up in the database and enable their access again. 

So how can you load these 10K values from a text file into SQL? One way would be to edit the text file, replace each new line with a comma and then use the resulting string in the select clause as shown:

select * from Customer where Id in (1, 2, 6, 8, 10)   

Now this might prove to be too much non-techy way. You are a programmer, right? You don't hard-code stuff! You write code!!

So how can you load these disabled customer list in the database programatically?

Create a temporary table and call it DisabledCustomers with just one column (name it Id and make sure it allows nulls and is not primary key - just in case your list from support has duplicates).  

Run the following SQL to load the values from the file into this table.  
BULK INSERT dbo.DisabledCustomers
   FROM 'c:\temp\customerids.txt'
   WITH
      (
         ROWTERMINATOR ='\n'
      ) 

Now your select statement becomes quite simple: 
select * from Customer c
inner join DisabledCustomers dc on c.Id = dc.Id 

Many production systems have BULK INSERT disabled? As an exercise to you, my dear reader, I look forward to seeing some innovative solutions to that.