In SQL Server, how do I generate a CREATE TABLE statement for a given table?

Question

I\'ve spent a good amount of time coming up with solution to this problem, so in the spirit of this post, I\'m posting it here, since I think it might be useful to others. <

Answer 1

Something I've noticed - in the INFORMATION_SCHEMA.COLUMNS view, CHARACTER_MAXIMUM_LENGTH gives a size of 2147483647 (2^31-1) for field types such as image and text. ntext is 2^30-1 (being double-byte unicode and all).

This size is included in the output from this query, but it is invalid for these data types in a CREATE statement (they should not have a maximum size value at all). So unless the results from this are manually corrected, the CREATE script won't work given these data types.

I imagine it's possible to fix the script to account for this, but that's beyond my SQL capabilities.