Question

We have a program in which each user is given their own Access database. We’d like to merge these all together into a single SQL Server database.

The problem is that, using the SQL Server import/export wizard, the primary/foreign keys do not get updated. So for instance if one user has this table:

1  Apple
2  Banana

and another user has this:

1  Coconut
2  Cheeseburger

the resulting table looks like this:

1  Apple
2  Banana
1  Coconut
2  Cheeseburger

Similarly, anything that referenced Banana by its primary key (2) is now referencing both Banana and Cheeseburger, which will not make the vegans very happy.

Is there any way to automatically update the primary/foreign key references when importing, other than writing an extremely long and complex import-script?

Answer 1

Ended up creating an SSIS project for this. SSIS is a visual programming tool made by Microsoft (and part of their “Business Integration Studio”, which comes with SQL Server) designed for solving exactly these sorts of problems.