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SQL Server FAQs - Creating/Managing Tables and Adding/Altering/Deleting Columns

By: FYIcenter.com

A collection of 16 FAQs on creating and managing tables on SQL Server 2005. Clear answers are provided with tutorial exercises on creating, renaming, and deleting tables; reviewing, renaming, deleting and adding table columns; changing column data types. Topics included in this collection are:

1. What is a table?
2. What are DDL (Data Definition Language) statements for tables?
3. How to create new tables with "CREATE TABLE" statements?
4. How To Get a List of All Tables with "sys.tables" View?
5. How To Get a List of Columns using the "sys.columns" View?
6. How To Get a List of Columns using the "sp_columns" Stored Procedure?
7. How To Get a List of Columns using the "sp_help" Stored Procedure?
8. How To Generate CREATE TABLE Script on an Existing Table?
9. How to create new tables with "SELECT ... INTO" statements?
10. How To Add a New Column to an Existing Table with "ALTER TABLE ... ADD"?
11. How To Delete an Existing Column in a Table with "ALTER TABLE ... DROP COLUMN"?
12. How to rename an existing column with the "sp_rename" stored procedure?
13. How to rename an existing column with SQL Server Management Studio?
14. How to change the data type of an existing column with "ALTER TABLE" statements?
15. How to rename an existing table with the "sp_rename" stored procedure?
16. How To Drop an Existing Table with "DROP TABLE" Statements?

To follow tutorials in this collection, you should connect to SQL server as the system administrator "sa" and run Transact-SQL statements presented in each tutorial. It is assumed that you are using the temporary database, FyiCenterData, created in previous tutorial collections.

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