MS-SQL binary viewer

Question

I have been given a MS-SQL database to gleen some reports from. However on first inspection most of the data is stored in binary format. Is there a utility avalible that would allow me to peek at the data in the binary fields to give me some sort of idea as to it's contents.

Answer 1

You could try:

SELECT CONVERT(varchar, binaryfield, 0) FROM table

Answer 2

Here, I wrote one. It's checked by our corporate antivirus, so it should be all safe. Besides, this is a .NET app, so it should be even safer.

Yes, .NET 2.0 is required.

Basic usage is as follows:

sqlblobviewer "server=(local)\sqlexpress;initial catalog=mydb;integrated security=true" _
    "select top 10 Binary from TableWithBinary"

("_" is line continuation).

What it does is basically exports binary data to files, so that you can examine them later.

Source code is as simple as it can possibly ever be.