I was forced recently to do some maintenance and bug fixing on an aging .NET-based CMS.
Most of the problems were in the SQL Server database, with lots of corrupted entries. The most frustrating thing however was that at times I didn’t even know where to find the entries. Try finding some specific strings in a database with a hundred tables, each with many columns (poorly named, obviously) and tens of thousands of records — it’s like finding the proverbial needle in the haystack.
You may remember a similar issue we had a few months ago, where we wrote a stored procedure to search & replace all occurences of a string in a table column. That was easy enough since we knew were to look.
The cool thing (even though it’s daunting at first) about SQL server is that you can obtain any information about the databases using SQL queries. After having a look at System Databases – master and its Views, it became a little clearer how to do it. Even better, I discovered that someone else had the same problem as myself, sparing me the need to reinvent the wheel.
The full source code of the stored procedure is here:
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
-- Tested on: SQL Server 7.0, SQL Server 2000, SQL server 2005
-- Date modified: 28th July 2002 22:50 GMT
CREATE TABLE #Results (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
The original article can be found here.
2 Responses
The script works fine provided you don’t need to search through ‘text or ‘ntext’ columns. I’ve tried adding these data types to line
AND DATA_TYPE IN (‘char’, ‘varchar’, ‘nchar’, ‘nvarchar’, ‘ntext’, ‘text’)
but this just throuws the following error:
Msg 8116, Level 16, State 1, Line 1
Argument data type ntext is invalid for argument 1 of left function.
Can anyone please help?
Hi, this procedure is very useful but does not search the numeric fields (getting tested). Here the modified procedure that includes the numeric fields:
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
— Tested on: SQL Server 7.0 and SQL Server 2000
— Date modified: 28th July 2002 22:50 GMT
— ****************************************
— Also for numeric field
— Modified by Ricardo Alfaro Vega
CREATE TABLE #Results (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
)
IF ISNUMERIC(@SearchStr) = 1
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 (‘int’,’bigint’,’smallint’,’tinyint’,’decimal’,’float’,’real’)
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
END
END
SELECT ColumnName, ColumnValue FROM #Results
END
GO
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