In this post, I am sharing a T-SQL script for changing or moving tables between the schema of SQL Server.

Copy table between servers, databases, schemas is a common requirement for all DBs. DBO is a default schema of a SQL Server. If you want to move your existing table into some other schema, you can try below script.

Change the schema of a table:

ALTER SCHEMA target_schema
TRANSFER dbo.table_name;

Move all tables into another table:

exec sp_MSforeachtable "ALTER SCHEMA target_schema TRANSFER ?"

Recently, I shared an interesting article on the move of your table from one filegroup to another file group by moving only clustered index in SQL Server.

SQL Server: Move your Table from one File Group to another File Group

I got one comment, and one of my readers faced error like “Error 5042 The file ‘FileName’ cannot be removed because it is not empty” while deleting an old file group/data file.
In this post, I am sharing a quick fix of the Error 5042.

The solution is to shrink your empty file before deleting an actual. You can use EMPTYFILE option in DBCC SHRINKFILE to remove all junk data of a file.

DBCC SHRINKFILE(File_Name,EMPTYFILE)

After that, you can remove a file from the database using below ALTER command.

ALTER DATABASE Database_Name REMOVE FILE File_Name

If you are finding most top 10 steps for SQL Server Performance tuning, you could get one of the items in the list is “multiple file-groups and various data-files increases the query performance”.This is correct.

You can move your fat table from master or primary data group to another custom file group.
It gives you more performance and very easy to do maintenance.

I am also asking this question to SQL DBA like “how to move a table from one File Group to another File Group?” and most of the times I am getting answers like “Create new file group -> Replicate table schema -> Move data -> Drop old table”.

The above answer is right, but instead of this great exercise, we can move a table to new file group by creating a clustered index only.

Here, You can access full demonstration.
Create a sample table:

CREATE TABLE tbl_Students 
(
	StudID INT IDENTITY(1,1)
	,Name VARCHAR(10)
	,CONSTRAINT pk_tbl_Students_StudID PRIMARY KEY(StudID)
)
GO

Insert few dummies record:

INSERT INTO tbl_Students(Name) VALUES ('Anvesh')
GO 100000

Check the table Information:

EXEC SP_HELP 'tbl_Students'
GO

Alter a database to add new file group:

ALTER DATABASE Database_Name ADD FILEGROUP New_FileGroup
GO

Add new data file (.ndf):

ALTER DATABASE Database_Name  ADD FILE
(
	NAME = 'New_DataFile', 
	FILENAME = 'C:\TempSQLData\New_DataFile.ndf',
	SIZE = 100000KB,
	FILEGROWTH = 65000KB
) TO FILEGROUP New_FileGroup
GO

Create a new CLUSTERED index on table within created new file group:

CREATE UNIQUE CLUSTERED INDEX pk_tbl_Students_StudID ON tbl_Students(StudID)
WITH
(
	DROP_EXISTING = ON
)
ON New_FileGroup
GO

Check the table information:

EXEC SP_HELP 'tbl_Students'
GO

If you need a space of old table, you can shrink your database:

DBCC SHRINKFILE ('Database_Name' , 0)
GO