Visual-studio – How to create a foreign key relationship in a SQL Server CE (Compact Edition) Database

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Visual Studio 2005 doesn't provide an interface for creating relationships between tables in a SQL Server CE database (I'm using version 3.0) and you can't open a Compact Edition DB using Management Studio as far as I know. Any ideas?

Best Answer

Unfortunately there is currently no designer support (unlike for SQL Server 2005) for building relationships between tables in SQL Server CE. To build relationships you need to use SQL commands such as:

ALTER TABLE Orders
ADD CONSTRAINT FK_Customer_Order
FOREIGN KEY (CustomerId) REFERENCES Customers(CustomerId)

If you are doing CE development, i would recomend this FAQ:

EDIT: In Visual Studio 2008 this is now possible to do in the GUI by right-clicking on your table.

Related Solutions

Visual-studio – Adding a guideline to the editor in Visual Studio

This is originally from Sara's blog.

It also works with almost any version of Visual Studio, you just need to change the "8.0" in the registry key to the appropriate version number for your version of Visual Studio.

The guide line shows up in the Output window too. (Visual Studio 2010 corrects this, and the line only shows up in the code editor window.)

You can also have the guide in multiple columns by listing more than one number after the color specifier:

RGB(230,230,230), 4, 80

Puts a white line at column 4 and column 80. This should be the value of a string value Guides in "Text Editor" key (see bellow).

Be sure to pick a line color that will be visisble on your background. This color won't show up on the default background color in VS. This is the value for a light grey: RGB(221, 221, 221).

Here are the registry keys that I know of:

Visual Studio 2010: HKCU\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\10.0\Text Editor

Visual Studio 2008: HKCU\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\9.0\Text Editor

Visual Studio 2005: HKCU\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\8.0\Text Editor

Visual Studio 2003: HKCU\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\7.1\Text Editor

For those running Visual Studio 2010, you may want to install the following extensions rather than changing the registry yourself:

These are also part of the Productivity Power Tools, which includes many other very useful extensions.

Extreme wait-time when taking a SQL Server database offline

After some additional searching (new search terms inspired by gbn's answer and u07ch's comment on KMike's answer) I found this, which completed successfully in 2 seconds:

ALTER DATABASE <dbname> SET OFFLINE WITH ROLLBACK IMMEDIATE

(Update)

When this still fails with the following error, you can fix it as inspired by this blog post:

ALTER DATABASE failed because a lock could not be placed on database 'dbname' Try again later.

you can run the following command to find out who is keeping a lock on your database:

EXEC sp_who2

And use whatever SPID you find in the following command:

KILL <SPID>

Then run the ALTER DATABASE command again. It should now work.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Visual-studio – Adding a guideline to the editor in Visual Studio

Extreme wait-time when taking a SQL Server database offline

(Update)

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