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Asked: 2026-05-11T01:11:47+00:00

When writing destructive queries (e.g., DELETE or UPDATE) in SQL Server Management Studio I

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When writing destructive queries (e.g., DELETE or UPDATE) in SQL Server Management Studio I always find myself wishing I could preview the results of the query without actually running it. Access very conveniently allows you to do this, but I prefer to code my SQL by hand which, sadly, Access is very poor at.

So my question is twofold:

  1. Is there an add-on for SSMS, or a separate tool that is furnished with good SQL hand-coding facilities that can also preview the result of a destructive query, similar to Access?

  2. Are there any techniques or best practices for doing previews ‘by hand’; e.g., somehow using transactions?

It seems to me that doing this sort of thing is fundamentally important but yet I can’t seem to find anything via Google (I’m probably just looking for the wrong thing – I am terribly ignorant on this matter). At present I’m taking a rather hairy belt and braces approach of commenting in and out select/delete/update lines and making sure I do backups. There’s got to be a better way, surely?

Can anyone help?

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1 Answer

  1. I would use the OUTPUT clause present in SQL SERVER 2008 onwards…

    OUTPUT Clause (Transact-SQL)

    Something like…

    BEGIN TRANSACTION  DELETE [table] OUTPUT deleted.* WHERE [woof]   ROLLBACK TRANSACTION

    INSERTs and UPDATEs can use the ‘inserted’ table too. The MSDN article covers it all.

    EDIT:

    This is just like other suggestions of SELECT then DELETE inside a transaction, except that it actually does both together. So you open a transaction, delete/insert/update with an OUTPUT clause, and the changes are made while ALSO outputting what was done. Then you can choose to rollback or commit.

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