Is there an automatic way in SQL Server 2005 to create a database from several tables in another database? I need to work on a project and I only need a few tables to run it locally, and I don't want to make a backup of a 50 gig DB.
UPDATE
I tried the Tasks -> Export Data in Management studio, and while it created a new sub database with the tables I wanted, it did not copy over any table metadata, ie...no PK/FK constraints and no Identity data (Even with Preserve Identity checked).
I obviously need these for it to work, so I'm open to other suggestions. I'll try that database publishing tool.
I don't have Integration Services available, and the two SQL Servers cannot directly connect to each other, so those are out.
Update of the Update
The Database Publishing Tool worked, the SQL it generated was slightly buggy, so a little hand editing was needed (Tried to reference nonexistent triggers), but once I did that I was good to go.
You can use the Database Publishing Wizard for this. It will let you select a set of tables with or without the data and export it into a .sql script file that you can then run against your other db to recreate the tables and/or the data.
Create your new database first. Then right-click on it and go to the Tasks sub-menu in the context menu. You should have some kind of import/export functionality in there. I can't remember exactly since I'm not at work right now! :)
From there, you will get to choose your origin and destination data sources and which tables you want to transfer. When you select your tables, click on the advanced (or options) button and select the check box called "preserve primary keys". Otherwise, new primary key values will be created for you.
I know this method can hardly be called automatic but why don't you use a few simple SELECT INTO statements?
Because I'd have to reconstruct the schema, constraints and indexes first. Thats the part I want to automate...Getting the data is the easy part.
Thanks for your suggestions everyone, looks like this is easy.
Integration Services can help accomplish this task. This tool provids advanced data transformation capabilities so you will be able to get exact subset of data that you need from large database.
Assuming that such data is needed for testing/debugging you may consider applying Row Sampling to reduce amount of data exported.
Create new database
Right click on it,
Tasks -> Import Data
Follow instructions
Related
Me and my friend both have sql server 2012. I have a database where I would like to copy over most of the tables into a database on my friends laptop. I am not sure not sure how to go about doing this?
I know in sql server that I can copy over data from one table in say database A to database B using the line below.
select * into database_a.dbo.MyTable from database_a.dbo.MyTable
What is the best way to connect the two laptops?
You could take a full backup and give it to him to restore. Or you could give him a copy of the *.mdf file and let him attach it to his DB.
There are two main options, one is to back up the database and send it to your friend. To do this right click on the database, Tasks and Backup. The problem with this approach is that if you're running even slightly different versions you may have issues.
The alternative is to script the database. To do this right on the database, click Tasks and Generate Scripts. Make sure you choose to script data and schema from the advanced options.
The latter is my preferred approach (as it's much more editable and human readable).
I'm creating the front-end for a project and I made a copy of the back-end database from the company's server and put it on my computer. I needed to make some changes (a few new tables and two new columns in an existing table) for security roles and other things so I duplicated the copied database and made my changes on the new one.
I want to deploy my project to the company's server now but we need to modify the original back-end database. I need to generate a SQL script that finds the changes between the old-database and my newer database, which can be run on the old database to create the new tables and columns. The script should retain the data from the old database and NOT add any junk/testing data I made in my new database.
By the way, I'm using SQL Server 2008 R2 and the old database on the server is on 2005. I've been looking around for utilities to use and found tablediff. However, it looks like it will copy the data and I can't see an argument on the information page to toggle this.
I'm sure it's simple but I'm not really sure how to do this. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks.
By far the solution I trust most to handle schema comparisons is Red Gate's SQL Compare:
http://www.red-gate.com/products/sql-development/sql-compare/
It has a companion called Data Compare which is designed specifically for data. You can grab the free trial to see if it does what you need in this case.
There are other options as well, for example SQL Server Data Tools has this functionality, though I haven't tested it to any degree that I could compare feature sets, performance, etc.
I've also blogged about why you want to use a tool and just pay for this functionality, rather than solve it programmatically yourself. The post also mentions a variety of alternatives if budget is a primary blocker:
http://bertrandaaron.wordpress.com/2012/04/20/re-blog-the-cost-of-reinventing-the-wheel/
I'm looking for an IDE or "visual editor" for some basic table manipulation.
I have a few tables, ~100K entries each. Most of them share two columns that together compose a UNIQUE PRIMARY KEY. These tables are static (they are just old record data), so no "online" or code interface is needed.
To be honest I only wish Excel or something like that could handle so many rows, since I want to perform simple tasks (e.g. erase a column, sort by column). What tool in your experienced is the most "Excel-like" for static tables?
Try Microsoft Access.
You can import or link to external data sources and access has lots of tools available to work with the data.
Using this method you will be able to do the following
View the data so that you can filter & sort the data.
write custom queries against the data (using a visual designer or SQL).
Add, edit and delete data (providing you have edit, delete privileges on the data source)
Write reports using the linked data.
Also, tables in Access 2007 and upwards look very much like Excel spreadsheets and as this is in the Microsoft office suite there are plenty of tools to export the data between Access and Excel.
phpmyadmin imo can serve as a good visual editor for what you need (though its 'online' and needs a running webserver)
DBDesignerFork is open source, free, and can reverse engineer your database to build the model.
You can then switch in to Query Mode and it will help you build queries from the table diagram.
You mention you want to be able to "erase a column, sort by column" these are two very different things. The sort is easily handled using an OREDER BY in your SELECT statements. Dropping columns can also be done in SQL using the ALTER TABLE command but remeber there is no easy "undo" unless you start wrapping your changes in transactions.
To sum up, you should forget the Excel comparison and learn SQL :)
Firstly, let me apologize for the title, as it probably isn't as clear as I think it is.
What I'm looking for is a way to keep sample data in a database (SQL, 2005 2008 and Express) that get modified every so often. At present I have a handful of scripts to populate the database with a specific set of data, but every time the database is changed all the scripts have to be more or less rewritten and I was looking for some alternatives.
I've seen a number of tools and other software for creating sample data in a database, some free and some not. Are there any other methods I haven’t considered?
Thanks in advance for any input.
Edit: Also, if anyone has any advice at all in dealing with keeping data in sync with a changing application or database, that would be of some help as well.
If you are looking for tools for SQL server, go visit Red Gate Software, they have the best tools. They have a data compare tool that you can use to keep lookup type tables up-to-date and a SQL compare tool that you can use to keep the tables synched up between two datbases. So using SQL data compare, create a datbase with all the sample data you want. Then periodically refresh your testing db (or your prod db if these are strictly lookup type tables) using the compare tool.
I also like the alternative of having a script (you can use Red Gate's tool to create scripts) because that means you can store this info in your source control and use it as part of a deployment package to other servers.
You could save them in another database or the same db in different tables distinguished by the name, like employee_test
Joseph,
Do you need to keep just the data in sync, or the schema as well?
One solution to the data question would be SQL Server snapshots. You create a snapshot of your initial configuration, so any changes to the "real" database don't show up in the snapshot. Then, when you need to reset the table, select from the snapshot into a new table. I'm not sure how it will work if the schema changes, but it might be worth a try.
For generation of sample data, the Database project in Visual Studio has functionality that will create fake/random data.
Let me know if this make sense.
Erick
I have 3 computers having the same sql server 2005 database, I would like to gather the data from the 3 computers to another computer which has the same database. Please help me.
This is called "data conversion" and a lot of your work will be to determine uniqueness on each one of them and coming up with strategies to prevent collisions, mainly primary keys that likely are the same across these databases. No simple answer here, it can be a project in itself.
It might be difficult without any manual data transformation. It depends on your database and type of the data. For example what do you use as a keys? If you have sequential integers as a primary/foreign keys, then you will have to do some manual data transformation. IF you use GUIDS, it will get slightly easier, but you still have to ensure that for example some lookup tables doesn't have different guid keys for same items etc.. But there is no took for doing this automatically.
Maybe if you have some very simple data without any relations to other tables (like table with one column with text messages etc) you can script the data with SQL Server Database Publishing Wizard, and then execute the scripts against your target database.
You need to backup your databases by right clicking in Enterprise Manager and choosing backup before choosing the location etc.
After backing up you can then restore to your local Sql Server by right clicking and choosing restore.
After you have the data locally you will need to write queries to transfer the data to your local database.
Alternatively you can use something like Red Gates Sql Data Compare to compare and transfer data using a visual interface. Although this costs money.
Redgate SQL Toolbelt may be able to help you. You would first copy database to that another computer and then compare it with Sql Data Compare against 3 databases always copying data only one way (to your new database). However I am not 100% sure if it will work like i think it would. You would have to verify it yourself.
Like other people suggested some things like primary keys etc may be problematic.