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Tags I am associated with: Microsoft SQL Server, IBM Cognos BI and Planning, Deltek Costpoint, Deltek Time & Expense, Magento, Intuit QuickBooks, Visual Basic 6, SSIS, Oracle, SQL development, data warehouse, reporting, eCommerce, accounting, finance, ETL

Saturday, December 15, 2012

How to export/import SQL Server tables with constraints/indexes

The Need: I have to copy the data in tables belonging to a schema user from one database in SQL Server 2005 to another. Note: the target table has all the indexes and constraints already, and I just wanted to refresh the data from source to target.

The Problem: The export/import wizard fails miserably when trying this task due to all the indexes and constraints on the target SQL tables (these are tables for a vendor software application which uses different schema users vs different databases for separating dev/test/prod environments). Additionally, I tried using SQL Server 2008 R2 SSMS's generate script functionality to generate both schema and data according to this post. This resulted in a 8GB file which failed when I ran sqlcmd with it on the target server. It seems to me there's some bug with either the generate script wizard or SQLCMD in dealing with strings that span multiple lines.
The errors when running SQLCMD were:
Msg 105, Level 15, State 1, Server , Line 
Unclosed quotation mark after the character string ... 
Msg 102, Level 15, State 1, Server , Line 
Incorrect syntax near ... 

The solution: I ended up doing the following: 
 1. Run script to generate SQL to drop all the tables belonging to a schema user on the target database. (this will drop all the dependent indexes/constraints etc) 

select 'DROP table [' + table_schema + '].[' + table_name + ']' 
from information_schema.tables 
where table_schema = 'mySchema

2. run the script generated from step 1 on target server to drop the tables. 
3. Run export/import wizard in SQL Server 2005 SSMS to copy all the desired tables from source to target database 
4. Run SQL Server 2005 SSMS to generate schema script of all the desired tables in source database, making sure to script all the indexes, constraints, and also script the if exists option. 
5. Run the script generated from step 4 on target database to recreate the indexes and constraints. 

Hope this helps!

Thursday, January 19, 2012

SSIS connection to Oracle server

Really want to get this down before I forget and hopefully this helps someone out there.

Issue: Connecting to an Oracle 10gR1 (can be other versions of 10 and 11 server) source from SSIS, development on Windows 7 x64 bit environment.

Solution: You will have to download the Oracle 11gR2 32-bit client from Oracle web site, do a custom install to only install the OLE DB provider and .NET provider.
Remember that if you want to run the SSIS package on a SQL Server 64-bit server, you will have to download the Oracle 11gR2 64-bit client and install that wherever the SSIS pkg will run.
In SSIS, choose the "Oracle provider for OLE DB", make sure you specify the Oracle servername, port and service name like this in "server or file name":
servername:1521/servicename
This way you DO NOT need to configure tnsnames.ora file. I repeat, you do not have to use archaic methods of configuring connection string.

Additional issue(s): My PATH environment variable is longer than 1023 characters due to many SQL versions. During Oracle client installation which complains about the max length of PATH variable, just ignore it, Windows 7 can handle more that 1023 chars in PATH var.