March 18, 2013 at 11:44 am
Ross McMicken (3/18/2013)In a perfect world, that would be true. Unfortunately, many of us work with systems that are rewrites of rebuilds of something that was converted from a mainframe hierarchical design 15 years ago.
I've got you beat. I work in a system that is a rewrite of a rebuild of something that was converted from a mainframe hierarchical design 25 years ago, but is owned by a 3rd party vendor, running 25-year-old application code in a virtual machine emulating said mainframe...thus no design changes or improvements are permitted except through updates sent via the vendor. We can add to the schema using a special naming convention, but we can't change the existing schema. So far, the system has over 5,400 tables and 134,000 columns.
March 20, 2013 at 7:02 am
SSC Rookie, I think we must have the same system. I have a stored procedure for this purpose that I got off of the web years ago and it has been a lifesaver.
CREATE PROC [dbo].[SearchForText]
(
@SearchStr nvarchar(100)
)
AS
BEGIN
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'
ANDQUOTENAME(TABLE_SCHEMA) + '.' + QUOTENAME(TABLE_NAME) > @TableName
ANDOBJECTPROPERTY(
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)
ANDTABLE_NAME= PARSENAME(@TableName, 1)
ANDDATA_TYPE IN ('char', 'varchar', 'nchar', 'nvarchar')
ANDQUOTENAME(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
I would love to work in a shop where this type of a search was never needed, but I did not know those jobs even existed.
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