Question

Export. We are doing the export Ms access to SQL Server.

We know how to export that table by table. What we are facing and no way to handle is that the relations which existed in MS Access between the table will lost after exporting. That is pretty annoying. Is there a way or tool that can allow us to deal with several tables one time or is there some workaround?

Answer 1

Since you tagged this with c#, I’m going to assume that you want to implement this yourself. Here are the building blocks that you need for this:

1. Create a DAO connection to your Access database (add a reference to the DAO library, create a new DBEngine and then use its OpenDatabase method to get a Database reference):

   DBEngine dbe = new DBEngine();
   Database db = dbe.OpenDatabase(pathToDatabase);
   

2. Iterate through the Relations property to access the relations stored in the MS Access database.

3. Create the relations in your SQL Server database. To do this, you can either

   • use SMO or

   • plain old T-SQL:

     ALTER TABLE table1 
     ADD CONSTRAINT table1_fkfield_fk FOREIGN KEY (fkfield) 
     REFERENCES table2 (pkfield)