Best practice would be to always specify a name.

But if you inherit a database across 1000's of locations and have to write update scripts, you may come across the need to drop a constraint for a column when you don't know the constraint name.

This script will find the constraint name based off the column and dynamically generate a drop statement for it.

SET @SelectStatement =  (SELECT 'ALTER TABLE [Machines] DROP CONSTRAINT ' + name

                                   FROM sysobjects               

                    WHERE parent_obj = object_id('TableName') AND xtype = 'D' AND name LIKE '%ColumnName%')

                           EXECUTE sp_executesql @SelectStatement

Recently I was given several text files with 500k to 1 million update statements in each that needed to be run.

Try loading and running this in SQL Server Management studio and you'll find that if it does load and run, sometimes it fails part through with memory error or other issues (all related to the client, not the engine).

It would have been better for the teams to work together and write this as a table join update as opposed to generating so many individual statements, but that ship had sailed and now these needed to be run.

I ended up "Walking the Dog" or RBAR (Row by agonizing Row).

Load the text files to a table, use a cursor to read each row and dynamically execute it.  I threw in a global counter i could query to figure out where it was at in the process.  In total it took about 2-3 hours to run.

Here is how to walk the dog.

SET NOCOUNT ON; 

  

DECLARE @sqlstmt nvarchar(4000)

 

create table ##Global_Count (current_rownum int)

insert into ##Global_Count values (0)

 

 

PRINT '-------- starting --------'; 

  

DECLARE cur_statements CURSOR FOR  

SELECT sqlstmt FROM DocumentId_3

  

OPEN cur_statements 

  

FETCH NEXT FROM cur_statements INTO @sqlstmt

 

WHILE @@FETCH_STATUS = 0 

BEGIN 

       Exec sp_Executesql @sqlstmt

       update ##Global_Count set current_rownum = current_rownum + 1

FETCH NEXT FROM cur_statements INTO @sqlstmt

END

 

Close cur_statements

Deallocate cur_statements

 

select * from ##Global_Count

drop table ##Global_Count