magarity kerns (4/18/2009)
Look. the straight copy all from the script doesn't have any kind of sorting or anything to make a lot of overhead - do you really have production servers that are so heavily loaded they can't handle a one time copy like I've suggested at some time during the week?
I've worked on databases that are mission critical, heavily used and over 1 TB in size, where a script of all the data will take some hours, during which the increased IO and the flushing of data from cache will degrade performance beyond what's acceptable.
If you DBs aren't that heavily used and are small enough that the copy won't take hours, great. I'm just pointing out that it's not the case for every system and that all methods to copy databases have some advantages and some disadvantages.
Gail Shaw
Microsoft Certified Master: SQL Server, MVP, M.Sc (Comp Sci)
SQL In The Wild: Discussions on DB performance with occasional diversions into recoverability