Transfer a SQL Server database without data

Question

I'm trying to move a database from a server in one data centre to a server in my local data centre. The pipe between the two is very slow. Luckily I only need to transfer the schema, not the data. Is there an easy way in SQL Server to transfer just the schema of a database without the data?

Answer 1

Go to Management Studio's Object Explorer and select Tasks > Generate Scripts ...

Then step through the wizard, select those objects you need, select whether to script out to a single file or to a file per table / view - whatever you need.

Then transfer the .sql script(s) to the target system, launch Management Studio there, run the scripts - done!

Answer 2

我会使用SQL Server发布向导 。

Answer 3

One approach would be to generate scripts of your existing database (in SSMS right-click the database, then Tasks, then Generate Scripts ...). Go through the wizard to generate your script file(s). Then run the script(s) on the target system.

Answer 4

There are a variety of third party tools which can do this for you pretty easily, such as Red Gate's SQL Compare and DB Ghost . ApexSQL has a free, community version of ApexSQL Diff . Devart has a dbForge Studio Express for SQL Server which has schema compare capabilities.

There are also several other questions on Stack Overflow which provide some ideas:

• Free Tool to compare Sql Server tables [closed]
• Best tool for auto-generating SQL change scripts for SQL Server [closed]
• Anyone know of any good Database Diff tools? [duplicate]

Microsoft's Visual Studio can even do schema comparisons now.

But you should be able to script the entire database using SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) as Marc S 's answer now describes. This option was also proposed by Chris Brandsma in his answer to Script entire database SQL-Server .