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I am attempting to copy about 5GB of reference data from a local SQL Server 2008 standard instance to a SQL Server 2008 Express instance on Amazon RDS. (This is a once off import)

Amazon recommend using Bulk Copy for anything larger than ~ 1GB. I have found examples for using bulk copy to copy single tables but not for copying all tables in a database.

Google gives me the following http://support.microsoft.com/kb/176818 but its a bit outdated.

My current plan is to update the above script to do what I need, but wondering if anybody has a better idea.

marc_s
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bcleary
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  • Does Amazon not allow you to simply take a backup? Oh, how much simpler this would be. – Aaron Bertrand Aug 29 '12 at 16:55
  • @Aaron Bertrand Not that I can see, doing a restore of a backup to an instance seems to require that the backup file exist on the file system of that instance but with RDS you don't get access to the file system. – bcleary Aug 29 '12 at 17:16
  • Yeah I've been told that the "backups" RDS supports are not true database backups but SAN snapshots. I wonder if Red-Gate's tool works with RDS. There HAS to be an easier answer than BulkCopy. – Aaron Bertrand Aug 29 '12 at 17:38
  • Looks like it handles Azure -> Amazon S3 but nothing else. Bummer. http://www.red-gate.com/products/dba/sql-azure-backup/ – Aaron Bertrand Aug 29 '12 at 17:39

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I often use the SQL Azure Migration Wizard for quick imports - not sure how long a load this size would take, but the tool is super-easy to use. Get it from CodePlex and here's a short screencast on how to use this free tool to do this.

Lynn Langit
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