Posted by Erland Sommarskog on 03/24/06 23:59

Jeff Kish (jeff.kish@mro.com) writes:
>>You can use Enterprise Manager to have it to generate change scripts.
>>However, there are several flaw in those scripts, and you need to review
>>them carefully, and also make several changes to them. For instance, the
>>transaction scope in those scripts are wacko.
>>
> Can you tell me how? I'm having some problem seeing how to get the
> equivalent alter table etc scripts out of EM. I looked, honest. I'll
> even look some more.

Right-click table and select Modify Table. As I said, it is not likely
it will generate ALTER TABLE commands, those you will have to write
yourself. But at least you will get some code to recreate constraints.
Just be sure to change WITH NOCHECK to WITH CHECK.

>>One potential problem is that you don't know the name of the constraints,
>>because they were added without a name, so all there is a system-generated
>>name. In this case, you need to retrieve the name, and then run DROP
>>CONSTRAINT dynamically. I would suggest that you restore the constraints
>>with a given name.
>>
> mmm not sure I understand.. they are originally added specifically. can
> I just disable them or do I need to drop them?

The error message from ALTER TABLE makes it clear that you have to
drop the constraint. Keep in mind that a FK column must match the
PK column it refers to, so if you change a PK/FK pair, you need to
drop constraints for both columns before changing.



Yes, it follows that from what I say that you should mainly generate
the script manually. This may seem like a crazy idea, but since it's
so important that you understand what the script does, it can be
dangerous to leave that in the hands of a tool.
--
Erland Sommarskog, SQL Server MVP, esquel@sommarskog.se

Books Online for SQL Server 2005 at
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/sql/2005/downloads/books.mspx
Books Online for SQL Server 2000 at
http://www.microsoft.com/sql/prodinfo/previousversions/books.mspx

[Back to original message]