This week I decided to focus on a few suggestions revolving around automation and making certain tasks easier to script or deploy. The first one that came to mind was a recent request from Nicholas Cain (blog | twitter), asking for a SCHEMA_ONLY backup option - to make moving a database *without* the data a much easier process: #660256 : Add ...

Upgrading a database with read-only filegroups Earlier today, I complained that I should be able to upgrade a database with read-only filegroups.  In this case an upgrade from, say, 2000 to 2005 is blocked because the engine can't update the system schema / structure.  Since I am trying to protect the data, not the system schema, I ...