Question

I have a local SQL Server Express database that I want to copy to a SQL Server database on a server. I do not have full permissions to the server, so I cannot directly attach it. Somebody told me I could do this by using the SqlBulkCopy^[MSDN] class.

I can’t figure out how to use it. I haven’t done enough database programming to be familiar with how this sort of thing is done.

Basically, I want to copy all the tables in one database to another. There are relationships between the tables, I don’t know if that will make a difference in the copying or not. There aren’t very many, so it wouldn’t be a big deal to just copy the data and then manually reassign the relationships.

This is as far as I could go

var localDatabase = new SqlConnection("connection string");
var serverDatabase = new SqlConnection("other connection string");
SomehowCopyAllTables(localDatabase, serverDatabase);

but unfortunately, Mr. C# didn’t want to acknowledge the existence of the SomehowCopyAllTables method.

How can I copy all the tables from one database to another?

Answer 1

Use SQL Server’s Generate Scripts command within SQL Server Management Studio.

• right click on the database; Tasks -> Generate Scripts
• select your tables, click Next
• click the Advanced button
• find Types of data to script – make the choice as you like: include data or not.
• you can then choose to save to file, or put in new query window.
• results in INSERT statements for all table data selected in bullet 2.
• copy/paste that output in the new query window onto your target server.