Question

In oracle, to drop all tables and constraints you would type something like

DROP TABLE myTable CASCADE CONSTRAINTS PURGE;

and this would completely delete the tables and their dependencies. What’s the SQL server equivalent??

Answer 1

I don’t believe SQL has a similarly elegant solution. You have to drop any related constraints first before you can drop the table.

Fortunately, this is all stored in the information schema and you can access that to get your whack list.

This blog post should be able to get you what you need:
http://weblogs.asp.net/jgalloway/archive/2006/04/12/442616.aspx

-- t-sql scriptlet to drop all constraints on a table
DECLARE @database nvarchar(50)
DECLARE @table nvarchar(50)

set @database = 'DatabaseName'
set @table = 'TableName'

DECLARE @sql nvarchar(255)
WHILE EXISTS(select * from INFORMATION_SCHEMA.TABLE_CONSTRAINTS where constraint_catalog = @database and table_name = @table)
BEGIN
    select    @sql = 'ALTER TABLE ' + @table + ' DROP CONSTRAINT ' + CONSTRAINT_NAME 
    from    INFORMATION_SCHEMA.TABLE_CONSTRAINTS 
    where    constraint_catalog = @database and 
            table_name = @table
    exec    sp_executesql @sql
END