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Tuesday, September 01, 2009

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Tip of the Day: A system procedure for locating fields in a database

When I go onto a client site, I usually don't have the luxury of designing everything from scratch. There are times (like on my current engagement) if I were given the choice, I'd say scrap it, but usually it doesn't happen that way. It is what it is... been saying that a lot lately!

So one of the tools I find useful is the ability to search for particular field names in the database. This is very similar to sp_findsp I use, which I have posted in the past off the net, but I have modified it so it gets registered as a system procedure.

So here's sp_findfields. It will return a fairly printable representation of the results of all fields which match the passed in string. It's registered as a system procedure in this script, so it is accessible to all databases.

Usage:

sp_findfields '%Contact%'

This will find all fields with the string 'Item' in it. Note you need to provide the wildcard characters.

USE master
GO

IF (SELECT OBJECT_ID('sp_findfields','P')) IS NOT NULL
    BEGIN
        DROP PROCEDURE sp_findfields
    END
GO

CREATE PROCEDURE sp_findfields
(@searchText varchar(50))
AS
BEGIN

    SELECT SchemaName = LEFT(TABLE_SCHEMA,10),
        TableName = LEFT(TABLE_NAME, 35),
        FieldName = LEFT(COLUMN_NAME, 40),
        DataType = LEFT(DATA_TYPE, 13),
        DataSize = CHARACTER_MAXIMUM_LENGTH,
        AlloysNulls = IS_NULLABLE
    FROM INFORMATION_SCHEMA.columns
    WHERE column_name like @searchText
    ORDER BY TableName, FieldName
END
GO

--Mark procedure as system object
EXEC sys.sp_MS_marksystemobject sp_findfields
GO

GRANT EXEC ON sp_findfields TO public
GO