Dropping multiple tables in SQL Server 2005

casper — Wed, 19 Sep 2007 09:14:00 GMT

I'm currently working on a project that has a Cache database that stores query results, and so naturally there are times when I'm playing inside of Management Studio that I want to delete the cache. However, I don't want to drop the entire database (because then I'd have to re-run the create script), nor do I want to delete all the tables in it (there is one table that needs to remain).

In case it's of use to anyone, or I need to do this again, here's a snippet of T-SQL that will drop an arbitrary list of tables from a database.

DECLARE @id varchar(255) 
DECLARE @dropCommand varchar(255) 
DECLARE tableCursor CURSOR FOR 
    SELECT name FROM sys.tables WHERE name <> 'CacheManager' 
OPEN tableCursor 
FETCH next FROM tableCursor INTO @id 
WHILE @@fetch_status=0 
BEGIN 
    SET @dropcommand = N'drop table ' + @id 
    EXECUTE(@dropcommand) 
    FETCH next FROM tableCursor INTO @id 
END 
CLOSE tableCursor 
DEALLOCATE tableCursor

I wish there was a 'Copy as HTML' function or something similar I could use to get the nicely formatted text from Management Studio into a blog posting.

Adventures of an aspiring agile developer in a not-quite agile world : SQL

Dropping multiple tables in SQL Server 2005