Backup and Restore through the Entity Framework.

Question

I'm working with an SQL Server database with about 50 tables and plenty of relationships between those tables. I have already written a backup and restore function which will retrieve all data from the model, export it to XML which it could then import again into a clean database. But maintaining this import/export is a lot of work when there are some major structural changes to the entity model. I want a more dynamic solution.

Is there a more dynamic solution to export data from an entity model and to import it back again into a clean database?

Oh, before I forget... I don't have direct access to the database itself, not it's connection. All I get and all I can use is this entity framework object...

Answer 1

Have you tried the SQL Server Publishing Wizard? It creates a nifty formatted SQL file that can be easily moved between application, I've also also used (with some search&replace based on regular expression) to move data from SQL Server to Oracle...

Regards
Massimo

Answer 2

I would be passing this back to your server support team. Seems a bit strange for an app developer to have to worry about data backup/restore.