Converting SQL Server 6.5 Databases to SQL Server 7.0

Can I create SQL Server 7.0 versions of our SQL Server 6.5 database that include everything (tables, views, logins, user data types—UDTs—and so on) except the application data?

Creating SQL Server 7.0 versions of your SQL Server 6.5 database is possible, but doing it the easy way requires downtime at both the target and source databases. (Don't attempt this project in prime time!) The SQL Server Upgrade Wizard will create these databases for you. The wizard contains a specialized OLE DB driver that can read SQL Server 6.5 files, convert the 6.5 database structure into a SQL Server 7.0 equivalent, then create the scripts required to copy over the objects (and data). This process requires full access to the SQL Server 6.5 files and hence downtime. In addition, to load the SQL Server 6.5 files into SQL Server 7.0, the wizard has to start the loading process with a specific trace flag, which requires stopping and starting the SQL Server 7.0 instance. Here are the steps you need to take to convert the databases.

All the instance-wide conversion scripts will be in your sqlserver..upgradesql65servername_Date+#_Time directory. (For example, in the directory, you can see the createdb.sql script, which shows you the CREATE DATABASE commands that the Interpreter would have to run to create the SQL Server 7.0 databases.) You'll find the database-object-specific scripts in subdirectories specific to each dbid (a number for the database found in master.dbo.sysdatabases) and dbname (database name). You can easily look through the files and figure out which files contain UDTs, which files contain stored procedures, and so on.

The hard way to convert the SQL Server 6.5 database to SQL Server 7.0 is to write your own queries against the SQL Server 6.5 catalog or use sp_help_revdatabase to create an output file. Then, you can use the output file as input to a program that parses the structures and do your own conversion.