Question

This probably has been asked before, but I was unable to find a satisfying answer.

I need to insert results of a stored procedure into a temporary table, something like:

INSERT INTO #TEMP EXEC MY_SP

I don’t know in advance how many columns the SP will return, so I need to prepare my #TEMP table (via dynamic ALTER .. ADD commands) to add columns to match SP resultset.

Assumption is – SP accepts no parameters and number of columns is always the same. But how do I determine that number in pure TSQL outside of SP so I can store it for example into a variable?

Answer 1

Tough one, especially if someone else is denying you the necessary permissions to run e.g. OPENROWSET.

Have you considered unpacking/script the SP and add its contents directly to your T-SQL? In this way you can modify and adapt it however you may want.

Otherwise, if you could explain more about the SP:

• What does the SP do?
• What kind of information does it output? One-N columns, – how many rows?
• Is it slow/fast? (Could we perhaps use a brute-force [try-catch] approach)?
• How does it determine the columns to output and how often does that change?
• Can you pre-determine the columns in any way? (So that you may use an INSERT #temp EXEC sp_getData syntax).

Best of luck!