Beginning Microsoft SQL Server 2008 ... - S3 Tech Training

Chapter 5: Creating and Altering Tables
Actually, this is about as simple as SQL statements get. We could drop both of our tables at the same
time if we wanted:
USE Accounting
DROP TABLE Customers, Employees
And this deletes them both.
Be very careful with this command. There is no, “Are you sure?” kind of question
that goes with this — it just assumes you know what you’re doing and deletes the
object(s) in question.
The syntax is very much the same for dropping the entire database. Now let’s drop the Accounting
database:
USE master
DROP DATABASE Accounting
You should see the following in the Results pane:
Command(s) completed successfully.
You may run into a situation where you get an error that says that the database cannot be deleted
because it is in use. If this happens, check a couple of things:
❑ Make sure that the database that you have as current in the Management Studio is something
other than the database you’re trying to drop (that is, make sure you’re not using the database
as you’re trying to drop it).
❑ Ensure you don’t have any other connections open (using the Management Studio or sp_who)
that are showing the database you’re trying to drop as the current database.
I usually solve the first one just as I did in the code example — I switch to using the master database.
The second you have to check manually — I usually close other sessions down entirely just to be sure.
Using the GUI T ool
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We’ve just spent a lot of time pounding in perfect syntax for creating a database and a couple of tables —
that’s enough of that for a while. Let’s take a look at the graphical tool in the Management Studio that
allows us to build and relate tables. From this point on, we’ll not only be dealing with code, but with the
tool that can generate much of that code for us.