Most of us like things that make our lives easier. When they’re free, it’s just that much sweeter. I would have sworn I’d done a post or two on SSMS Tools Pack before, but apparently this one has slipped through the cracks. No Longer!
SSMS Tools Pack is a free add-in for SSMS created by Mladen Prajdic. This tool provides a whole slew of useful features that are missing from SSMS, but today I will focus on the one that has saved me several hours of time in the past week alone: The ability to Script Grid results.
Often when testing out bug fixes on development I won’t have the exact rows that are causing a problem on the prod server, or just won’t have good test data for a variety of reasons. With SSMS TP I can run a quick query on prod and script out the rows I’d like to move over, right click in the results grid and just like that I’ve got my rows all ready to copy over and insert directly into the table. It’s also great for creating the inserts we ask for on the SSC forums when people want to provide sample data.
You can just as easily use this functionality to script an entire table or even an entire database (I haven’t tried this last one, but I can see it being useful to some); all from a free tool.
