Procedure to script your data (to generate INSERT statements from the existing data)

This procedure generates INSERT statements using existing data from the given tables and views. Later, you can use these INSERT statements to generate the data. It's very useful when you have to ship or package a database application. This procedure also comes in handy when you have to send sample data to your vendor or technical support provider for troubleshooting purposes.

Advantages:

• Data from both tables and views can be scripted
• No CURSORs are used
• Table names and column names with spaces are handled
• All datatypes are handled except images, large text and binary columns with more than 4 bytes
• NULLs are gracefully handled
• Timestamp columns are handled
• Identity columns are handled
• Very flexible and configurable
• Non-dbo owned tables are handled
• Computed columns are handled
• You can filter the rows for which you want to generate INSERTs

Here is the link:

http://vyaskn.tripod.com/code.htm#inserts

Difference between using SET and SELECT when assigning variables in T-SQL

I came across a great article by Narayana Vyas Kondreddi that describes the difference between the SET and SELECT .

The article is well worth the read, but here are the main points:

1. SET is the ANSI standard for variable assignment, SELECT is not.
   SET can only assign one variable at a time, SELECT can make multiple assignments at once.
2. If assigning from a query, SET can only assign a scalar value. If the query returns multiple values/rows then SET will raise an error. SELECT will assign one of the values to the variable and hide the fact that multiple values were returned (so you'd likely never know why something was going wrong elsewhere - have fun troubleshooting that one)
3. When assigning from a query if there is no value returned then SET will assign NULL, where SELECT will not make the assignment at all (so the variable will not be changed from it's previous value)
4. As far as speed differences - there are no direct differences between SET and SELECT. However SELECT's ability to make multiple assignments in one shot does give it a slight speed advantage over SET.

Take a look at the complete article to see Vyas' complete tests to get the entire picture: [http://vyaskn.tripod.com/differences_between_set_and_select.htm]