Recently there was a need to get rid of a replication column after replication was disabled on a SQL Server 2000 database. The customer wanted to get rid of a column for all the tables which replication had added. And the flip side was that this column had a constraint defined on it. I looked at the constraint names and found that they had a common sub-string “msrepl_tran”. So by joining the system catalogs syscontraints and syscolumns, we were able to create the necessary T-SQL scripts to drop the constraint and the column from the tables involved.

select 'ALTER TABLE [' + OBJECT_NAME(a.id) + '] drop constraint [' + OBJECT_NAME(a.constid) + ']' + CHAR(13) +

'alter table [' + OBJECT_NAME(a.id) + '] drop column ['+ b.name + ']' + CHAR(13) + 'go'

from sysconstraints a

inner join syscolumns b on a.id = b.id

where OBJECT_NAME(a.id) like '%msrepl_tran%'

NOTE: Use CTRL+T and F5 to generate the script above. Inspect the output to ensure that no unintended table gets affected.