I have an application that uses a SQL Server database with several instances of the database…test, prod, etc… I am making some application changes and one of the changes involves changing a column from a nvarchar(max) to a nvarchar(200) so that I can add a unique constraint on it. SQL Server tells me that this requires dropping the table and recreating it.
I want to put together a script that will do the table drop, recreate it with the new schema, and then reinsert the data that was there previously all in one go, if possible, just to keep things simple for use when I migrate this change to production.
There is probably a good SQL Server way to do this but I’m just not aware of it. If I was using Mysql I would mysqldump the table and its contents, and use that as my script for applying that change to production. I can’t find any export functionality in SQL server that will give me a text file consisting of inserts for all data in a table.
Use SQL Server’s Generate Scripts command
INSERTstatements for all table data selected in bullet 2.