Exporting data from SQL Server by generating an insert script

I was moving some data between a couple of databases the other day (just data from a couple of the tables). Basically, I'd created a new feature, tested it a bit which had generated some entries in a new database table and I wanted to move these to the test system.

I was about to do my normal "right click source database -> tasks -> export data..." dance when a colleague mentioned that I could just generate an insert script for the data to either a file, my clipboard or a new query editor window. I couldn't believe I hadn't found this gem before... Although it is reasonably hidden! I gave him the Control+Shift+R short cut for refreshing SSMS intellisense local cache so I guess we're even now.

Anyway, the steps:

Open up SQL Server Management Studio

Expand the databases node in the Object Explorer

Right click the database that you want to generate a script for and go to Tasks -> Generate Scripts
 
Database node context menu

On the dialog that comes up, select what you want to script - in my case, just one table:
Choosing objects to script

Click to go to the next screen, then click "advanced"
The location of the advanced button ;) just in case you couldn't find it

Scroll down the advanced options and change the "types of data to script" option to "Data only" (or whatever you want).
Before changing the types of data to script


Click OK and then finish the wizard. It will generate you a nice script of inserts in batches of 1000 (max number of inserts per batch).

Lovely.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Trimming strings in action parameters in ASP.Net Web API

In standard MVC it's very easy to create a model binder to trim all of the strings passed into action methods. The approach I used for that was from here:  http://blogs.taiga.nl/martijn/2011/09/29/custom-model-binders-and-request-validation/ . It works well and it trims the properties of models too. The problem came when I tried to do the same thing for Web API. I added a similar StringTrimmingBinder and registered it as a service using the very non-discoverable API: var provider = new SimpleModelBinderProvider( typeof ( string ),  new StringTrimmingModelBinder()); GlobalConfiguration.Configuration.Services.Insert( typeof (ModelBinderProvider),  0,  provider); As a side note, I have no idea how you're supposed to find out how to register a model binder without opening up Bing and Googling it. Anyway, this worked great when the parameters to the action were actually strings but doesn't work with complex types as parameters. Now, I've n
Read more

Full text search in Entity Framework 6 using command interception

Image
Background One of the main problems we encountered using Entity Framework was its lack of support for full text search. Our search function is based around a series of processors that attempt to match the incoming phrase against a set of patterns that we're expecting (10+). For example, there's one for dates and times, recent financial quarters as well as more domain specific ones. Everything is cached and so is really fast, except when it isn't: Here's the monitoring chart for our SQL DB in Azure That's a spike to 100% resource utilisation because we fall through to a phrase search as a last resort (which cannot be cached) - it's exceedingly rare but it still hurts. Before EF, the app used full text search and it was one of the casualties when the app was migrated to EF4 several years ago. The lack of full text search has been getting more and more painful as the amount of data has grown. We really needed full text search back... Command intercept
Read more

Composing Expressions in C#

This post follows on from  Reusing predicates in Entity Framework . In my previous post I introduced the "and" extension method which allowed me to create a new entity framework safe expression from two existing expressions. Here's how we make that happen: The code is from a blogpost from Colin Meek from 2008:  InvocationExpression and LINQ to Entities . I'll just dump my version of the code here. The idea is exactly the same (even using the visitor as an immutable stack): public class InvocationExpander : ExpressionVisitor { private readonly ParameterExpression _parameter; private readonly Expression _expansion; private readonly InvocationExpander _previous; public static T Expand<T>(T expr) where T : LambdaExpression { return (T) new InvocationExpander().Visit(expr); } public InvocationExpander() { } private InvocationExpander(ParameterExpression parameter, Expression expansion, Invocati
Read more