How to create database project from existing SQL Server database?

database, sql, sql-server-2005, visual-studio-2008

Solution

There no direct, built-in support to do that, unfortunately.

You can get close by doing this:

- in SQL Server Management Studio, go to the Object Explorer, right-click on the database you want, and pick Tasks > Generate Scripts

- select all the database objects you want to script out

- at the end, choose to generate the scripts into separate files for each db object

What you end up with are a number of .sql scripts in a folder of your choice, which basically represent your database.

Next:

- create a Database Project in Visual Studio 2008

- once you've done that, add the existing scripts to that project

It's a bit more involved that it should be - but that's the only way that I know of to achieve this right now. Don't know if VS2010 will support this in an easier way....

Problem

Original source