Question

I am trying to run a code to insert rows from one table using rows from a different table on a different database.
I had this:

INSERT [testDB].[dbo].[table1]
SELECT * FROM 
[sourceDB].[dbo].[table1]
LEFT OUTER JOIN [testDB].[dbo].[table1] 
ON [sourceDB].[dbo].[table1].[PKcolumn] = [testDB].[dbo].[table1].[PKcolumn]
WHERE [testDB].[dbo].[table1].[PKcolumn] IS NULL

However I was told to add correlation names so I made this:

INSERT test
SELECT * FROM 
[sourceDB].[dbo].[table1] as source
LEFT OUTER JOIN 
[testDB].[dbo].[table1] as test
ON 
source.[PKcolumn] = test.[PKcolumn]
WHERE test.[PKcolumn] IS NULL

I ended up getting this as an error message:

Msg 208, Level 16, State 1, Line 1
Invalid object name ‘test’.

Does anyone know what I’m doing wrong?

Answer 1

In the first line you should use the real table name as in

insert into testDB.dbo.table1

SQLServer does not accept an alias or correlation name in that spot, and I confirmed that by testing.

But you can use the alias later in the query and it can be quite useful to do so to avoid ambiguity about which table a column comes from.

Another potential problem in this query is the use of select *. This tries to insert the combined column set from sourcedb.dbo.table1 and testdb.dbo.table1 into testdb.dbo.table1. That can’t work.

Instead of select * you could say…(assuming source and test have exactly the same columns)

select source.*

or you could call out the specific columns as in…

select source.colA, source.col3, etc....

I don’t know the names of your columns.