Are there any programs that will allow you to follow a sql transaction through to it’s end? For instance, say I’ve inherited a rather complex sql database with a data dictionary. The data dictionary is pretty good, but not as good as say, SQL Doc. I’ve taken a look at Red Gate’s Dependency Tracker and, while that does a very good job of putting things together (triggers, stored procedures, tables, views, etc.), it still does nothing for following a transaction through it’s various tracks.
What I’d like is software that will allow me to enter a transaction and based on everything in my db, tree it out visually to let me see what’s happening during the transaction. Does that make sense or do I need to elaborate?
Edited to elaborate: While the answers below were very good, it’s not exactly what I’m looking for. The front end of the sql database was built with PowerBuilder. I can use SqlSpy during frontend data input and that helps to follow transactions through, but it’s all the t-sql and as you can imagine, reams of output. I’m looking for something that would do the same thing, but lay it out visually with the ability to tree out the detail if I wanted to.
If you open a connection in Visual Studio, you can run sprocs and queries in debug mode. i.e. you can go step by step over a query with intellisense and see the values in the variables.