Question

I have a database with 69 tables and I want to select only the first three records of each table.

I can do it per table with:

SELECT TOP 3 * 
  FROM table_schema.table_name

However if I was to do this manually, it would take a lot of time.

Could you please suggest a workaround?

I tried this solution but I can get it to work (I don’t know how to modify it for MSSQL)

EDIT Thanks for your replies. I probably wasn’t clear enough: I meant I wanted to parse each individual table and only get the top 3 records than move on to the next one.
Yaroslav’s code below is what I needed

DECLARE @sql VARCHAR(MAX)='';
SELECT @sql=@sql+'SELECT TOP 3 * FROM '+'['+SCHEMA_NAME(schema_id)+'].['+name+']'+';'
  FROM sys.tables
EXEC(@sql)

Answer 1

Here you have:

DECLARE @sql VARCHAR(MAX)='';
SELECT @sql=@sql+'SELECT TOP 3 * FROM '+'['+SCHEMA_NAME(schema_id)+'].['+name+']'+';'
  FROM sys.tables
EXEC(@sql)