I want to create a table based on the definition of another table.
I'm coming from oracle and I'd normally do this:
CREATE TABLE schema.newtable AS SELECT * FROM schema.oldtable;
I can't seem to be able to do this in SQL Server 2008.
There is no such syntax in SQL Server, though CREATE TABLE AS ... SELECT
does exist in data warehouse technologies (like APS / dedicated pools). In SQL Server you can use this query to create an empty table:
SELECT * INTO {schema_name}.newtable
FROM {schema_name}.oldtable
WHERE 1 = 0;
(If you want to make a copy of the table including all of the data, then leave out the WHERE
clause.)
Note that this creates the same column structure (including an IDENTITY
column if one exists) but it does not copy any indexes, constraints, triggers, etc.
If you don't want to keep the IDENTITY
property, you can just convert it first to its original data type:
SELECT IdentityColumn = CONVERT(int/bigint, IdentityColumn),
...other columns...