Hanssens

Having a neatly organized datalayer, perhaps a great ORM will make any developers life easier. But there are times when the best architecture simply isn’t good enough to answer a simply question like: “Are there any occurences of ‘a-specific-peace-of-text’ in the database?”. Sometimes you just need to look through all the tables and views to answer this.

Trivial, but inevitable.

Luckily, using the stored procedure defined below, originally by Narayana Vyas Kondreddi, this becomes a breeze. Simply create it in the database and use it like so:

exec SearchAllTables ‘gummy bears’;

This executes a case insensitive search on all tables in the relevant database, and neatly spits out the fields where the string occurs in.

Here is the stored procedure:

CREATE PROC SearchAllTables ( @SearchStr nvarchar(100) ) AS BEGIN

-- Copyright © 2002 Narayana Vyas Kondreddi. All rights reserved.
-- Purpose: To search all columns of all tables for a given search string
-- Written by: Narayana Vyas Kondreddi
-- Site: http://vyaskn.tripod.com + http://stackoverflow.com/questions/436351/how-do-i-find-a-value-anywhere-in-a-sql-server-database
-- Tested on: SQL Server 7.0 and SQL Server 2000
-- Date modified: 28th July 2002 22:50 GMT

DECLARE @Results TABLE(ColumnName nvarchar(370), ColumnValue nvarchar(3630))

SET NOCOUNT ON

DECLARE @TableName nvarchar(256), @ColumnName nvarchar(128), @SearchStr2 nvarchar(110)
SET  @TableName = ''
SET @SearchStr2 = QUOTENAME('%' + @SearchStr + '%','''')

WHILE @TableName IS NOT NULL
BEGIN
    SET @ColumnName = ''
    SET @TableName = 
    (
        SELECT MIN(QUOTENAME(TABLE_SCHEMA) + '.' + QUOTENAME(TABLE_NAME))
        FROM    INFORMATION_SCHEMA.TABLES
        WHERE       TABLE_TYPE = 'BASE TABLE'
            AND QUOTENAME(TABLE_SCHEMA) + '.' + QUOTENAME(TABLE_NAME) > @TableName
            AND OBJECTPROPERTY(
                    OBJECT_ID(
                        QUOTENAME(TABLE_SCHEMA) + '.' + QUOTENAME(TABLE_NAME)
                         ), 'IsMSShipped'
                           ) = 0
    )

    WHILE (@TableName IS NOT NULL) AND (@ColumnName IS NOT NULL)
    BEGIN
        SET @ColumnName =
        (
            SELECT MIN(QUOTENAME(COLUMN_NAME))
            FROM    INFORMATION_SCHEMA.COLUMNS
            WHERE       TABLE_SCHEMA    = PARSENAME(@TableName, 2)
                AND TABLE_NAME  = PARSENAME(@TableName, 1)
                AND DATA_TYPE IN ('char', 'varchar', 'nchar', 'nvarchar')
                AND QUOTENAME(COLUMN_NAME) > @ColumnName
        )

        IF @ColumnName IS NOT NULL
        BEGIN
            INSERT INTO @Results
            EXEC
            (
                'SELECT ''' + @TableName + '.' + @ColumnName + ''', LEFT(' + @ColumnName + ', 3630) 
                FROM ' + @TableName + ' (NOLOCK) ' +
                ' WHERE ' + @ColumnName + ' LIKE ' + @SearchStr2
            )
        END
    END 
END

SELECT ColumnName, ColumnValue FROM @Results
END

Enjoy!