mssqldump, a small utility to dump MS SQL Server data

In the past few months I found myself busier with moving data here and there, so much that scripts ending with load(transform(extract())) have become my bread and butter — sad life, some say!

Last night I wanted to import a bunch of data stored in SQL Server into a MySQL database, but didn’t want to get my hards dirty with a GUI or PowerShell because, well, PowerShell.

The result was mssqldump, a small utility – similar to mysqldump – to export data into TSV.

Usage

mssqldump does one thing — and hopefully well — run a query against the database and export the results as TSV to the stdout:

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./mssqldump -q "SELECT Name, 1 as ID, RAND() as thing from sys.Databases"
master    1    0.4318099474883688
tempdb    1    0.4318099474883688
model     1    0.4318099474883688
msdb      1    0.4318099474883688
test      1    0.4318099474883688

You can also include headings (column names) with the -c option:

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./mssqldump -q "SELECT Name, 1 as ID, RAND() as thing from sys.Databases"
Name      ID   thing
master    1    0.4318099474883688
tempdb    1    0.4318099474883688
model     1    0.4318099474883688
msdb      1    0.4318099474883688
test      1    0.4318099474883688

If you want to print mssqldump’s version information you can just specify v or version as the query parameter:

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./mssqldump -qversion
1.0.0

If you want to use mssqldump simply download the latest release from github and start dumping data around!

A couple surprises

Building mssqldump was an experience on its own, as I discovered a couple useful things:

• Microsoft is killing it lately — I wanted to test this out and was resigned to spinning up a SQL Server instance on Azure. Turns out a simple docker run -e 'ACCEPT_EULA=Y' -e 'SA_PASSWORD=Password123!' --net host -d --name mssql --rm microsoft/mssql-server-linux does the trick!
• knowing I was developing a CLI tool in Golang, I thought I would need to resort to cobra — wanting to try to simplify things up I instead opted for go-flags, which has way less features but is also less opinionated and faster to setup (cobra is probably overkill for a CLI app with only one command)

Adios!