Amazon RDS w/ SQL Server wont allow bulk insert from CSV source

I know this question is really old, but it was the first question that came up when I searched bulk inserting into an aws sql server rds instance. Things have changed and you can now do it after integrating the RDS instance with S3. I answered this question in more detail on this question. But overall gist is that you setup the instance with the proper role, put your file on S3, then you can copy the file over to RDS with the following commands:

exec msdb.dbo.rds_download_from_s3
        @s3_arn_of_file='arn:aws:s3:::bucket_name/bulk_data.csv',
        @rds_file_path='D:\S3\seed_data\data.csv',
        @overwrite_file=1;

Then BULK INSERT will work:

FROM 'D:\S3\seed_data\data.csv'
WITH
(
    FIRSTROW = 2,
    FIELDTERMINATOR = ',',
    ROWTERMINATOR = '\n'
)

AWS doc


You can enable ad hoc distributed queries via heading to your Amazon Management Console, navigating to your RDS menu and then creating a DB Parameter group with ad hoc distributed queries set to 1, and then attaching this parameter group to your DB instance.

Don't forget to reboot your DB once you have made these changes.

Here is the source of my information:

http://blogs.lessthandot.com/index.php/datamgmt/dbadmin/turning-on-optimize-for-ad/

Hope this helps you.