You can't automatically do it, some decisions have to be made. Also remember a functionality may exist that would use a table in the database, but just hasn't been used by your users YET. arbitrarily dropping tables without reviewing the code of your application is not a responsible way to tackle this kind of issue.

To at least identify potential tables to drop, though,

Here's how i would do it:

restore a database from 6 months ago.

compare the count(*) of all rows[/url] in OldDB to CurrentDB. and tables that have the same count potentially are not used (or are lookup tables that never change, like a list statuses,counties or states)

of those tables that had the same count, and also are not lookup tables,

I would examine their results from one of the many "Compare Two Databases" scripts from here on SSC.

those that don't have changes might meet the drop criteria after the application code is reviewed.