Louis Davidson shows off a bit of SQL Server Management Studio’s SQLCMD mode:
In the creating a database script, there are quite a few parameters you will want as part of your script. The database name, the settings, whether or not to drop the database or not. Built into SQL Server Management Studio is a cool tool called
SQLCMDmode. Scripts using this mode get a few scripting tools that are really useful. These tools allow you to do things like insert other script files, set environment variables, and one I particularly like, make sure you don’t accidentally execute a script if no code is highlighted using EXIT to start your script ().Where it is really lacking is in the area of control of flow language. In this blog I am going to share a few techniques I have used to get around this when building scripts that need to optionally execute different bits of code.
Click through to see how you can use it. Going one step further, you can directly script against sqlcmd.exe, which can be useful for automating deployments.