I ran a lot of (am still running a lot of) bcp commands today. I just barely thought of the notion that I should/could have scripted a sproc to run all the bcp commands.
Here’s a well-discussed example: BCP all tables into files from a database from Less Than Dot.
SELECT 'EXEC xp_cmdshell ''bcp ' --bcp
+ QUOTENAME(DB_NAME())+ '.' --database name
+ QUOTENAME(SCHEMA_NAME(SCHEMA_ID))+ '.' -- schema
+ QUOTENAME(name) -- table
+ ' out c:temp' -- output directory
+ REPLACE(SCHEMA_NAME(schema_id),' ','') + '_'
+ REPLACE(name,' ','') -- file name
+ '.txt -T -c'',no_output' -- extension, security, no output
FROM sys.tables
With or without xp_cmdshell, I guess we can’t actually run these commands as we create them. They still need to be run in Query Analyzer or SSMS.
For Microsoft’s help page for bcp, see bcp Utility.