Q & A: what to do with third party tables in master db
Q:
> "Niles" <Niles@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message
> news:48E0BCCD-78CA-4C4D-8F32-26D4D62857A2@microsoft.com...
>>A couple of vendor installations of systems installed additional tables
>> within the master database. Some of these tables exist in the vendor's
>> database and in master. I'd like to get rid of them from master but 2
>> things
>> concern me:
>>
>> 1) I don't want to accidently delete tables that should be part of master
>> so
>> if I can find a comprehensive list of tables that should be part of
>> master
>> that'l be great
>>
>> 2) I don't want the applications to loose functionality with this clean
>> up.
>> Are there any apps that would need their tables within master or are
>> these
>> just badly written scripts.
>>
>> Thanks for your thoughts and ideas in advance
>
>
A:
Regarding 1)... To be more precise, *most* tables in master are marked as
"system". However SQL Server does come with a few tables that look like
"user" tables in the master database. You can verify this by looking at
master database of a clean installation of SQL Server with ISQLW. For
example, you will see the table "spt_values".
Regarding the original question of getting rid of tables in master installed
by a third party application. I would not expect that applications to
continue to work. Regarding other applications, it should be safe as long as
these application don't know and don't use the tables you are deleting.
If you installed multiple third party applications, then without proper
information from the vendors it would be difficult to figure out which table
in master is needed by which application. I guess you could install these
applications one at a time in a test environment, then list the objects in
master and compare. It could be quite time consuming.
Finanlly, please remember to take a backup of master before you attempt to
delete anything there, and practice restore of master from the backup in a
test environment.
