SqlCommand() ExecuteNonQuery() truncates command text

Question

I\'m building a custom db deployment utility, I need to read text files containing sql scripts and execute them against the database.

Pretty easy stuff, so far so g

Answer 1

Yep, everyone hits this snag the first time they start sending the contents of SQL script files to the database.

GO is not a T-SQL command. It's the end-of-batch marker recognised by all the Microsoft interactive SQL tools (Management Studio, isql, osql). In order to handle it, you will have to write your own parser to break out every block of text in the file between GO statements and feed them to the database as separate commands.

How you implement your parser is up to you. It could be simple (read in each line at a time, detect lines that consist of nothing but GO and whitespace) or complex (tokenising all the statements and working out whether a GO is a genuine statement or a bit of text inside a string or multi-line comment).

Personally I went with the first option. It handles 99% of all SQL files you are ever likely to encounter with no fuss. If you want to go the whole hog and write a tokeniser, I'm sure lots of people have done one already, just Google for it.

Example:

using(var reader = new SqlBatchReader(new StreamReader(dmlFile))) {
    string batch;
    while((batch = reader.ReadBatch()) != null) {
        var cmd = new SqlCommand(batch, conn, trans) { CommandType = CommandType.Text };
        cmd.ExecuteNonQuery();
    }
}

class SqlBatchReader : IDisposable {
    private TextReader _reader;
    public SqlBatchReader(TextReader reader) {
        _reader = reader;
    }
    /// 

    /// Return the next command batch in the file, or null if end-of-file reached.
    /// 
    public string ReadBatch() {
        // TODO: Implement your parsing logic here.
    }
}