Microsoft Sql Server 2008 R2 Command Line Utilities Download
Claretha Beuter
Installing sqlcmd (Go) via a package manager will replace sqlcmd (ODBC) with sqlcmd (Go) in your environment path. Any current command line sessions will need to be closed and reopened for this take to effect. sqlcmd (ODBC) won't be removed and can still be used by specifying the full path to the executable. You can also update your PATH variable to indicate which will take precedence. To do so in Windows 11, open System settings and go to About > Advanced system settings. When System Properties opens, select the Environment Variables button. In the lower half, under System variables, select Path and then select Edit. If the location sqlcmd (Go) is saved to (C:\Program Files\sqlcmd is default) is listed before C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\\Tools\Binn, then sqlcmd (Go) is used. You can reverse the order to make sqlcmd (ODBC) the default again.
SSMS uses the Microsoft .NET Framework SqlClient for execution in regular and SQLCMD mode in Query Editor. When sqlcmd is run from the command-line, sqlcmd uses the ODBC driver. Because different default options may apply, you might see different behavior when you execute the same query in SSMS in SQLCMD Mode and in the sqlcmd utility.
All commands must fit on one line, even EXIT. Interactive mode doesn't check for open parentheses or quotes for commands, and doesn't prompt for successive lines. This behavior is different to the ODBC version, which allows the query run by EXIT(query) to span multiple lines.
Currently, sqlcmd doesn't require a space between the command-line option and the value. However, in a future release, a space may be required between the command-line option and the value.
Using -P should be considered insecure. Avoid giving the password on the command line. Alternatively, use the SQLCMDPASSWORD environment variable, or interactively input the password by omitting the -P option.
Requests a packet of a different size. This option sets the sqlcmd scripting variable SQLCMDPACKETSIZE. packet_size must be a value between 512 and 32767. The default is 4096. A larger packet size can enhance performance for execution of scripts that have lots of Transact-SQL statements between GO commands. You can request a larger packet size. However, if the request is denied, sqlcmd uses the server default for packet size.
Specifies the batch terminator. By default, commands are terminated and sent to SQL Server by typing the word GO on a line by itself. When you reset the batch terminator, don't use Transact-SQL reserved keywords or characters that have special meaning to the operating system, even if they're preceded by a backslash.
If the optional parameter c is specified, the output appears without the Servers: header line, and each server line is listed without leading spaces. This presentation is referred to as clean output. Clean output improves the processing performance of scripting languages.
The total length of the sqlcmd command-line in the command environment (for example cmd.exe or bash), including all arguments and expanded variables, is determined by the underlying operating system.
If only user_name is specified (either as an option, or as an environment variable), the user is prompted to enter a password. Users aren't prompted if the SQLCMDUSER or SQLCMDPASSWORD environment variables have been set. If you don't provide options or environment variables, Windows Authentication mode is used to sign in. For example, to connect to an instance, instance1, of SQL Server, myserver, by using integrated security you would use the following command:
sqlcmd input files can be specified with the -i option or the :r command. Output files can be specified with the -o option or the :Error, :Out and :Perftrace commands. The following are some guidelines for working with these files:
Check the exit code and DOS ERRORLEVEL variable after the process has exited. sqlcmd returns 0 normally, otherwise it sets the ERRORLEVEL as configured by -V. In other words, ERRORLEVEL shouldn't be expected to be the same value as the error number reported from SQL Server. The error number is a SQL Server-specific value corresponding to the system function @@ERROR. ERRORLEVEL is a sqlcmd-specific value to indicate why sqlcmd terminated, and its value is influenced by specifying -b command line argument.
Causes the value passed to the bcp -S option to be interpreted as a data source name (DSN). A DSN can be used to embed driver options to simplify command lines, enforce driver options that aren't otherwise accessible from the command line such as MultiSubnetFailover, or to help protect sensitive credentials from being discoverable as command line arguments. For more information, see DSN Support in sqlcmd and bcp in Connecting with sqlcmd.
Specifies the instance of SQL Server to which to connect. If no server is specified, the bcp utility connects to the default instance of SQL Server on the local computer. This option is required when a bcp command is run from a remote computer on the network or a local named instance. To connect to the default instance of SQL Server on a server, specify only server_name. To connect to a named instance of SQL Server, specify server_name**\**instance_name.
Except where specified otherwise, the examples assume that you use Windows Authentication and have a trusted connection to the server instance on which you're running the bcp command. A directory named D:\BCP is used in many of the examples.
Windows has two command-line shells: the Command shell and PowerShell. Each shell is a software program that provides direct communication between you and the operating system or application, providing an environment to automate IT operations.
The Command shell was the first shell built into Windows to automate routine tasks, like user account management or nightly backups, with batch (.bat) files. With Windows Script Host, you could run more sophisticated scripts in the Command shell. For more information, see cscript or wscript. You can perform operations more efficiently by using scripts than you can by using the user interface. Scripts accept all commands that are available at the command line.
You can also enable or disable file and directory name completion per instance of a Command shell by running cmd.exe with the parameter and switch /F:ON or /F:OFF. If name completion is enabled with the /F:ON parameter and switch, the two control characters used are Ctrl-D for directory name completion and Ctrl-F for file name completion. User-specified settings take precedence over computer settings, and command-line options take precedence over registry settings.
The sqlcmd utility is a command-line tool that lets you submit T-SQL statements or batches to local and remote instances of SQL Server. The utility is extremely useful for repetitive database tasks such as batch processing or unit testing.
This article describes how to install the command-line tools. If you are looking for examples of how to use sqlcmd or bcp, see the Related content at the end of this article.
If you run SQL Server in a Docker container, the SQL Server command-line tools are already included in the SQL Server Linux container image. If you attach to a running container with an interactive bash shell, you can run the tools locally.
If you are creating a container with the SQL Server command-line tools, you should add ACCEPT_EULA=Y to the installation command to silently accept the EULA, and not interrupt image creation. An example final command as part of installation on an Ubuntu-based image is:
You can use mssql-scripter on Linux, macOS, and Windows to generate data definition language (DDL) and data manipulation language (DML) T-SQL scripts for database objects in SQL Server running anywhere, Azure SQL Database, and Azure SQL Data Warehouse. You can save the generated T-SQL script to a .sql file or pipe it to standard *nix utilities (for example, sed, awk, grep) for further transformations. You can edit the generated script or check it into source control and subsequently execute the script in your existing SQL database deployment processes and DevOps pipelines with standard multiplatform SQL command line tools such as sqlcmd.
A big part of operationalizing SQL Server is to monitor to ensure that SQL Server is performant, highly available, and secure for your applications. With SQL Server 2017, Dynamic Management Views (DMVs) on Windows are also accessible on Linux, allowing your existing scripts and tools that rely on DMVs to continue to work. Traditionally, to get this information, you would use GUI admin tools such as SSMS or command line tools such as SQLCMD to run queries.
Today, we are also introducing a new experimental Linux tool, DBFS, which enables you to access live DMVS mounted to a virtual filesystem using FUSE. All you need to do is view the contents of the virtual files in the mounted virtual directory to see the same data you would see as if you ran a SQL query to view the DMV data. There is no need to log in to the SQL Server using a GUI or command line tool or run SQL queries. DBFS can also be used in scenarios where you want to access DMV data from the context of a script with CLI tools such as grep, awk, and sed.
This article describes TRACERT (Trace Route), a command-line utility that you can use to trace the path that an Internet Protocol (IP) packet takes to its destination.
This article discusses the following topics:
There are several command-line options that you can use with TRACERT, although the options are not usually necessary for standard troubleshooting.
The following example of command syntax shows all of the possible options: