SQL Server 2008 Express R2 Format query output to textfile

Question

I have a large table (~ 6GB) which is bigger than my computers RAM that I'm trying to output from a SQL Server data base to a text file in a specific format to be used as an input for another program.

The data base looks looks something like this:

bought    month     day
   0        11       01
   0        10       07
   1        01       06
   1        04       03
   0        08       03
   0        07       03
   0        02       03
   0        11       05
   1        09       02
  ...       ...     ...

I need the output file to be formatted like this:

0 | month:11 day:01
0 | month:10 day:07
1 | month:01 day:06
1 | month:04 day:03
0 | month:08 day:03
0 | month:07 day:03
0 | month:02 day:03
0 | month:11 day:05
1 | month:09 day:02
...

Any suggestions for how to do this?

Answer 1

If you're running SQL Server management studio, you can output to a file.

Go to Tools-> Options -> Query Results and you should be able to choose "Results to file" - specify the directory underneath, and run your query.

Answer 2

Should just need a bit of string concatenation.

SELECT bought + ' | month:' + month + ' day:' + day
FROM tablename

I must confess, I've never tried this on such a large dataset so I can't tell you how it will perform, however once you've entered the query, you can tell SSMS to send the output to a text file as per Bridge's answer.