Monday, September 8, 2014

New Add-on for SSMS: T-SQL Flex

Do you ever copy query results out of SQL Server Management Studio, paste them into your text editor, and then perform gold-medal find + replace gymnastics to create T-SQL scripts?

Do you ever need to copy a small amount of data from one SQL server to another, but don’t want to set up a linked server or take the time to create an SSIS package?

Do you ever need to create simple Excel sheets from SQL Server queries – preferably one tab per query result and with valid formatting (such as showing dates correctly and not truncating leading zeros)?

Have you ever wanted to quickly script a temp table that has the exact schema (including nullability and precision) of a query, stored procedure, or table-valued function?

If you answered yes to any of the above questions, there is a new add-on available for SQL Server Management Studio that you may like called T-SQL Flex.

TSqlFlexScriptToInserts

T-SQL Flex is a free, open-source add-on for SQL Server Management Studio that does only two things:

  1. It scripts SQL query results to INSERT statements.
  2. It scripts SQL query results to Excel-compatible spreadsheets (specifically, XML Spreadsheet 2003 format).

Because T-SQL Flex does only these two things, it is very easy to use.  Simply paste in your query and click the “Run ‘n’ Rollback” button.  T-SQL Flex will create an ADO.NET transaction, run your query, collect the results, and then roll back the transaction.

You can check out the latest release here:

https://github.com/nycdotnet/TSqlFlex/releases

If you like T-SQL Flex, please let Steve know on Twitter:

https://twitter.com/nycdotnet

Thanks to the team at Red-Gate that created the SIP framework used by T-SQL Flex.

Happy scripting!