• If there are many foreign key relationships and the tables end up being deleted, beware. Deleting is a logged operation and your log file will go through the roof not to mention this will be a very lengthy operation. I'd suggest if there are only four tables, that you consider copying them from the populated database to any empty database. We keep a schema only copy of our production database for a similar purpose. We take limited records from almost every table and repopulate an empty db so that we're left with a much smaller version of our production database. As an example, one of our dbs is 400Gb. After our process, the database is only 15-20Gbs. This process takes only a few hours. Deleting the data would take MUCH longer and result in a very large log file.

    Alternately, consider scripting all foreign keys, dropping all foreign keys, truncate tables not needed, and then reapply foreign keys.

    Paul