In a previous article, I covered how to use the sp_msforeachtable system stored procedure to look through a list of tables and perform an action on them. You may want to read that article before continuing.

When loading data, nothing can be more frustrating than having to deal with stubborn constraints and triggers. This is especially true when you know your data is fine but the constraints are too prohibitive for a mass initial load. Here's a technique I use to disable the constraints and triggers temporarily during a mass load.

To do this, we can use the sp_msforeachtable system stored procedure to loop through each table and issue an ALTER TABLE statement to dsable the constraint and trigger. The ALL clause at the end of the command will disable all constraints and triggers. There is no need to drop referential integrity to load data. If you turn on NOCHECK, constraints will not be checked. Here's the code to perform this:

sp_msforeachtable "ALTER TABLE ? NOCHECK CONSTRAINT all"
sp_msforeachtable "ALTER TABLE ? DISABLE TRIGGER  all"

To enable them back, you can reverse the function. Let's get a little more creative this time. We'll explicitly set the parameters and list each table before enabling them so we can verify any errors easily.

sp_msforeachtable @command1="print '?'", @command2="ALTER TABLE ? CHECK CONSTRAINT all"
sp_msforeachtable @command1="print '?'", @command2="ALTER TABLE ? ENABLE TRIGGER  all"

As I mentioned before, you never want to drop constraints during development. Instead disable them temporarily until the problem is debugged.