Drop all tables that start with underscore

In an ironic twist of fate I adapted my ‘Drop all temp-tables’ script, to drop all tables beginning with an underscore.

Yes, it is ironic, because it uses a temp-table to store the working list of tables to be deleted. Whilst my original script used a real table to store a list of temp-tables.

Well … ok then

-- DropAllTablesStartingWithAnUnderscore.sql

IF OBJECT_ID('tempdb..#tables') IS NOT NULL DROP TABLE #tables
SELECT [name] 
INTO #tables
FROM sys.tables
WHERE [name] LIKE '/_%' ESCAPE '/'

DECLARE @table VARCHAR(200), @cmd VARCHAR(500)
WHILE (SELECT COUNT(*) FROM #tables) > 0
BEGIN
	SET @table = (SELECT TOP(1) [name] FROM #tables)
	SET @cmd = 'drop table ' + @table
	EXEC(@cmd)
	DELETE FROM #tables WHERE [name] = @table
END

In case you were wondering why I created these underscore-tables in the first place. I was refactoring a stored-procedure that took over an hour to run, and had a large number of temp-tables. I wanted to persist those temp-tables for another day, and not have to start from scratch.

(one day I’ll write a book on how I refactor / re-write)