Question

I would like to enhance an existing bat file to log execution duration to a SQL Server table. The current bat file has a single line that calls a command line utility.

I thought I would leverage something like this, SQL Statements in a Windows Batch File. Pseudo code:

StartTime = Now()
hyperioncommandlineshell.cmd /a:parm1 /b:parm2 /c:parm3
sqlcmd.exe -b -S myhost -E -d mydatabase -Q "Insert Into MyTable Values (Current_Timestamp, 'MyProcess', Now() - StartTime)" -W    

Some questions:

1. The server that this bat file runs on doesn’t have the SQL tools, and I see from this post that it does require an installation (you can’t just copy over the sqlcmd.exe file). This will meet with resistance. Is there another way to execute a SQL statement from a batch file without having to install software?

2. I don’t have experience with BAT files. Can someone provide guidance on how to get the duration of a process (like grabbing the start time, and calculating the difference at the end)?

I would probably try using another tool I’m more familiar with, but I’m trying to do this in bat so that the change only affects one existing object, and doesn’t require additional objects.

Answer 1

Windows computers come with ODBC drivers already installed, so you likely have an ODBC driver for SQL Server. If so, then you might be able to get Microsoft’s osql utility to run T-SQL statements from DOS. Here’s the docs for it on MSDN:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa214012(v=SQL.80).aspx

It was designed for SQL Server 2000, so there may be some issues connecting to later versions of SQL Server, but it is worth a try. If it works, then you won’t have to install anything special to connect to your SQL server (though you may need to create an ODBC data source name for the server…). From Windows Vista+, click Start and type ODBC to open the ODBC Data Source Editor.

Using SQLCMD will require that you install the Native Client, or at least SNAC (discussion thread: http://us.generation-nt.com/answer/how-install-only-sqlcmd-exe-utility-help-87134732.html) to simply run SQLCMD without installing the entire Native Client (though, SNAC still needs to be installed). I haven’t heard of SNAC before, so that will take a bit of research. I assume installing anything will be met with the same resistance, so if you can overcome that resistance, installing the Native Client is probably your best bet.

As for the elapsed time. You can use %DATE% %TIME% to get the current date/time. So you could use something like the following to capture the start time, run your process and then capture the end time — posting them all to the database:

set StartTime=%DATE% %TIME%
hyperioncommandlineshell.cmd /a:parm1 /b:parm2 /c:parm3
set EndTime=%DATE% %TIME%
sqlcmd.exe -b -S myhost -E -d mydatabase -Q "Insert Into MyTable Values ('%StartTime%', 'MyProcess', '%EndTime%')" -W 

You won’t be able to do the StartTime - EndTime computation with DOS itself, but you can store both the start and end times in the table an use SQL to do it.

The format of %DATE% and %TIME% are based on the format that the machine is setup to use. You can type echo %DATE% %TIME% at a DOS prompt to see how it is formatted for you. You will likely have to store these values in varchar fields since the format may not automatically convert to a datetime value. If it does automatically convert, then you could do the computation in the SQL statement from DOS, like this:

sqlcmd.exe -b -S myhost -E -d mydatabase -Q "Insert Into MyTable Values ('%EndTime%' - '%StartTime%', 'MyProcess')" -W

(FYI – I used your pseudo-code for all examples, so nothing is tested.)