Incremental output in QA and writing to files

[Steve]

Hi;

Before I start let me say I know this is a silly way to go about
things, but it is one of those "my company made me do it" things.

My company is in the process of ( finishing ) migrating from foxpro to
sqlserver.

They have a foxpro program that does a lot of various updates. I
would like to write a tsql script to replace it.

The trick is that the tsql script would have to have some procedural
programming artifacts that I don't think it has.

I/my company would like the script to generate output messages that
the user can see while the script is running. Everytime I have ran a
script in query analyzer I usually don't see the output ("print"
statemetns, etc ) until all of the work is
done. Is there a way to run thing so I can see the output statements
as the work is being done?

Can print statements work from within a tsql loop?

The other thing is that I/my company wants the tsql script to write
output messages to a log file while it is operating ( for error
checking and other logging).

Is this possible with tsql?

Thanks in advance for the info

Steve

[Simon Hayes]

st**********@ya hoo.com (Steve) wrote in message news:<6f******* *************** ***@posting.goo gle.com>...

Hi;

Before I start let me say I know this is a silly way to go about
things, but it is one of those "my company made me do it" things.

My company is in the process of ( finishing ) migrating from foxpro to
sqlserver.

They have a foxpro program that does a lot of various updates. I
would like to write a tsql script to replace it.

The trick is that the tsql script would have to have some procedural
programming artifacts that I don't think it has.

I/my company would like the script to generate output messages that
the user can see while the script is running. Everytime I have ran a
script in query analyzer I usually don't see the output ("print"
statemetns, etc ) until all of the work is
done. Is there a way to run thing so I can see the output statements
as the work is being done?

Can print statements work from within a tsql loop?

The other thing is that I/my company wants the tsql script to write
output messages to a log file while it is operating ( for error
checking and other logging).

Is this possible with tsql?

Thanks in advance for the info

Steve

The output of PRINT doesn't appear until the batch completes, which is
why you can't see it - you could use RAISERROR WITH NOWAIT instead. As
for logging output, if you run your script with osql -o, then you can
get the output into a file.

But you might consider a wrapper script in Perl, VB, etc. to run the
statements in your TSQL script and handle the results. It will be much
easier to do parsing, text file manipulation etc. I appreciate your
position, but perhaps you can sell the idea that using the best tool
for the job means that not everything should be done in pure SQL.

Simon