SQL Server Management Studio: Increase number of characters displayed in result set

Question

I have the following scenario: We have stored procedures which compare our developement database to our customer databases and tell us, what the difference is (so, what we have to update on the customer machine).

Now I wrote some additional code to automatically generate the CREATE/ALTER/DROP statements needed to bring the customer database to the same status as our developement database.

My code works fine, but I have a problem with SQL Server Management Studio: I can't tell it to display more than 8192 characters per column in the result set while using text output. Is there a way to increase this number?

Thanks for your help!

Answer 1

I was having trouble viewing converted nvarchar(max) to XML columns in SSMS because of the character limitation. However, running the exact same query in Azure Data Studio works.

Answer 2

In Visual Studio 2010 Database projects you can add a "Schema comparisson" file. You simply point to a "source" database and "target" database and the system automatically finds any differences and can also generate the necessary sql code to update the target database.

There might also be some freeware database comparisson tools available that might be able to do the same thing ...

Answer 3

If you really want to stay with SSMS, breakup your output to more than one column.

Answer 4

No way to do that from management studio. There is a configuration option, but that is the top limit :(

Other have asked this question before.

Answer 5

Dont think it can be done.

For viewing your stored procedure, I would use another tool which doesn't have that limitation.

Answer 6

You can change the size by going to the Tools/Option menu and opening the Query Results branch on the tree control. Then under the Results to Text leaf is the the “Maximum number of characters in a column” value. But I think the max is 8192.