How to efficiently write to file from SQL datareader in c#?

Question

I have a remote sql connection in C# that needs to execute a query and save its results to the users\'s local hard disk. There is a fairly large amount of data this thing ca

Answer 1

I came up with this, it's a better CSV writer than the other answers:

public static class DataReaderExtension
{
    public static void ToCsv(this IDataReader dataReader, string fileName, bool includeHeaderAsFirstRow)
    {

        const string Separator = ",";

        StreamWriter streamWriter = new StreamWriter(fileName);

        StringBuilder sb = null;

        if (includeHeaderAsFirstRow)
        {
            sb = new StringBuilder();
            for (int index = 0; index < dataReader.FieldCount; index++)
            {
                if (dataReader.GetName(index) != null)
                    sb.Append(dataReader.GetName(index));

                if (index < dataReader.FieldCount - 1)
                    sb.Append(Separator);
            }
            streamWriter.WriteLine(sb.ToString());
        }

        while (dataReader.Read())
        {
            sb = new StringBuilder();
            for (int index = 0; index < dataReader.FieldCount; index++)
            {
                if (!dataReader.IsDBNull(index))
                {
                    string value = dataReader.GetValue(index).ToString();
                    if (dataReader.GetFieldType(index) == typeof(String))
                    {
                        if (value.IndexOf("\"") >= 0)
                            value = value.Replace("\"", "\"\"");

                        if (value.IndexOf(Separator) >= 0)
                            value = "\"" + value + "\"";
                    }
                    sb.Append(value);
                }

                if (index < dataReader.FieldCount - 1)
                    sb.Append(Separator);
            }

            if (!dataReader.IsDBNull(dataReader.FieldCount - 1))
                sb.Append(dataReader.GetValue(dataReader.FieldCount - 1).ToString().Replace(Separator, " "));

            streamWriter.WriteLine(sb.ToString());
        }
        dataReader.Close();
        streamWriter.Close();
    }
}

usage: mydataReader.ToCsv("myfile.csv", true)