How to Make a MS SQL Server Structure Dump?

When you want to reverse engineer an existing MS SQL Server database into DeZign for Databases you can connect to the database directly or you can make a database structure dump and import that structure dump. A dump will contain SQL statements to create the table and/or populate the table.

MS SQL Server provides two ways of controlling dumps through the Enterprise Manager and through a Transact-SQL command.

Transact-SQL command:

DUMP DATABASE {dbname | @dbname_var}
TO dump_device [, dump_device2 [..., dump_device32]]
[WITH options [[,] STATS [ = percentage]]]

Enterprise Manager:

You can also use the Enterprise Manager’s Backup/Restore dialog box to perform dumps. You activate the Database Backup/Restore dialog box by right-clicking the database in the Server Manager and choosing Backup/Restore or by going to the Tools menu and choosing Database Backup/Restore.

Please note that DeZign for Databases only needs a dump of the table structures. The data will be ignored. Also note that default a unicode text file/script is generated by SQL Server. Please use WordPad (or another utility) to make it/save as a normal DOS text file. If the imported SQL script is not a normal text file, DeZign for Databases will not find any table.

See also: How to make a MySQL structure dump?, How to make a DB2 structure dump?