Question

I’m looking for a way to get all table creation and alteration queries attached to a database, in SQL Server 2000. Is this stored in a system table, or is there a built in method to remake them?

Goal: to extract the schema for customizable backups.

My research so far turned up nothing. My Google-Fu is weak…

Answer 1

Note that I don’t know that there’s a way to specify which filegroup a stored procedure is on (other than the default). So what you may consider, in order to at least keep the script repository backup small, is:

1. create a filegroup called non_data_objects, and make it the default (instead of PRIMARY).
2. create a filegroup for each set of tables, and create those tables there.
3. backup each set of tables by filegroup, and always include a backup of non_data_objects so that you have the current set of procedures, functions etc. that belong to those tables (even though you’ll also get the others). Because 1. will only contain the metadata for non-data, it should be relatively small.

You might also consider just using a different database for each set of tables. Other than using three-part naming in your scripts that need to reference the different sets, there really is no performance difference. And this makes your backup/recovery plan much simpler.