You can now script your database objects as a Notebook using SQL Server Management Studio 18.5+

Great News Everyone!

Microsoft just dropped SSMS 18.5 after almost 5 long months without any updates; this new release fixes a lot of bugs and introduces a few new features, above them all I’m now showing you the following.

I’m sure that you used the the “Generate Scripts” feature in SSMS quite a few times, you could generate the code for schema and/or data for any (or all) the objects in your DB, especially if you haven’t embraced that sweet, elusive, devops workflow.

Well, good news! Other than file, clipboard and the good ‘o new query window, you can now export directly to a new Notebook.

The process is the same as always:

• Right click on your Database of choice
• Click Tasks -> “Generate Scripts”
• Skip the introduction page, if any, it’s useless
• Select whether you want to script the entire DB or specific objects, next
• Now here you’ll see the new option among the others:

Two more next buttons and our Notebook is ready to go.

Since, as before, you can pick and choose which elements and data include in the extraction, this could be useful to share schema/data information for discussion, demos or collaboration.

The result will be a notebook file like this (I’m using Azure Data Studio to open it up):

Then you can share the file wherever you want, and be happy!