Question

How to render all records from all tables in the sample database, below query is returning all the tables record counts. but i want all records from all tables in the sample database.

SELECT   TableName = o.name,
         Rows = max(i.rows)
FROM     sysobjects o
         INNER JOIN sysindexes i
           ON o.id = i.id
GROUP BY o.name
ORDER BY Rows DESC

Answer 1

You can use an undocumented(*) stored procedure to run a query against each table in the database:

exec sp_MSforeachtable 'select * from ?'

This will return one result set for each table. If you want the table name as a separate column:

exec sp_MSforeachtable 'select ''?'' as TableName,* from ?'

There’s no easy way to get just a single result set since, in general, the columns of all of the tables in a database will not be compatible with each other.

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(*) Hopefully, the danger here is obvious. It’s undocumented, so it’s possible that it will go away or change based on any servicing operations applied to SQL Server. On the other hand, I doubt they will ever remove it, and it doesn’t have any special magic inside. For belt and braces, you might want to copy the procedure into your own database under a different name, and then you can rely on it not being changed.