Let's say you have a table with many data rows, now you want to create a backup copy of this table of all rows or a subset of them, you can use the "SELECT ... INTO" statement. The tutorial script below gives you a good example:

INSERT INTO tip VALUES (1, 'Learn SQL',

'Visit www.GlobalGuideLine.com','2006-05-01')

GO

SELECT * INTO tipBackup FROM tip

GO

(1 rows affected)

SELECT * FROM tipBackup

GO

id subject description create_date

1 Learn SQL Visit www.rendc.org 2008-05-01

sp_columns tipBackup

GO

TABLE_OWNER TABLE_NAME COLUMN_TABLE TYPE_NAME ...

dbo tipBackup id int ...

dbo tipBackup subject varchar ...

dbo tipBackup description varchar ...

dbo tipBackup create_date datetime ...

As you can see, the "SELECT ... INTO" statement created a table called "tipBackup" using the same column definitions as the "tip" table and copied all data rows into "tipBackup".