How to hide/disable tables without dropping them to check redundancy? I have to maintain and extend an old legacy system which contains webservice methods and database tables that are no longer used. Since I’m not entirely sure that the tables are really redundant, I’m afraid to drop them.

Is there any other way to achieve the same effect (tables cannot be used any more) without dropping them? My idea was to transfer them to a different schema (e.g., Deleted) from the current default, dbo.

IF NOT EXISTS (SELECT * FROM sys.schemas WHERE name = 'Deleted')
BEGIN
   EXEC('CREATE SCHEMA Deleted')
END

ALTER SCHEMA Deleted TRANSFER dbo.TableName;


Is there any other option or are there any drawbacks to the schema approach?
A couple of other options are to just rename the tables, or if they have clustered indexes, you can disable the clustered index.