This product isn't available for public consumption yet, but I thought I would give everyone a taste of what's to come. It's a bulk data loader for doing SQL Server application installs, especially installs that need to load a lot of data. 
Bulk Data Loader
If you have a few megabytes of data to load into your database (The application I wrote it for has about 600 MB to load), using SQL Insert statements is too slow. SQL Server's Bulk Insert command makes that load in a snap.
With this tool you ship your data in a Zip archive, with the data in each table stored in a text file in that archive using a tab delimited format. When I ran it for my 600 MB load the entire load completed in five or ten minutes. Loading that data via Insert statements ran for a couple of hours, far too long for any install to safely run without causing a tech support nightmare.
I'm currently using a different tool to build the archives, but when this product is released you'll get a working data extraction tool as well as the data loading component.
The data loading tool has another important feature: it doesn't require any special data access components to be installed on the server. That means that you can ship it on a CD and run the program directly from the CD, rather than requiring an additional software install. That makes it really great if you distribute regular data updates as part of your application.
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You'll find that special
You'll find that special characters like tab and cr/lf are escaped effectively. This has been tested, as the production dataset I developed this against had such characters. The tool absolutely won't deal with blobs, which would require me to use the native format.
That's something for a later version though, and possibly for something commercial instead of this free version.
--
Clay Dowling
President
Lazarus Internet Development
>> with the data in each
>> with the data in each table stored in a text file in that archive using a tab delimited format.
Might be better if the tool, optionally maybe, used the "native" format of BCP so that any embedded binary characters, including TAB itself, and also CR/LF etc., were taken care of.