MS SQL Server Console Applications

For a small project I was involved in, I needed an MS SQL Viewer similar to MySQL Workbench.

I might have been wrong, but it seemed like the MS offering required you to have a Professional (at a minimum) license to the dev tools.

Fond something called RazorSQL. Pretty cool, but you need to pay per license. I have no problem with that as I’m a big advocate for paying developers for these amazing products that they create for us to use. In order to use this product with MS SQL Server, you need to first setup an ODBC connection. I will walk through this below.

I found another offering that actually saves time, money and energy, and it’s from MS themselves. It’s a plugin for VS Code. you still have to setup the ODBC connection, but once that is done it’s plain sailing to connect.

Setting up ODBC connection

  1. Windows start and type ODBC

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Once you install the ODBC connection you can create a connection from RazorSQL or mssql plugin for vscode.

When you create a new connection, you should be able to do it without the database name, and it shows yu a list of databases running on the server. At the moment it’s failing. It only seems t work if you ut the database name in.