Question

I am expected to make (small) changes to the legacy SQL application on Microsoft SQL Server 2008. It uses several databases, many stored procedures, functions, and some CLR assemblies.

There is no big-picture documentation, only some common knowledge in the heads of the people around.

What tools do you use when you search for say all places where the stored procedure is called? I am not the experienced SQL developer. My experience fits better with programming languages where source code is stored in text files rather than in the databases.

What tools would you recommend to learn the content of the legacy SQL application?

Thanks, Petr

Answer 1

For the specific question:

all places where the stored procedure is called?

You can use brute force, though this will lead to some false positives where the procedure name is simple and may appear in code naturally (even as part of another object name), or in comments:

SELECT OBJECT_SCHEMA_NAME([object_id]), OBJECT_NAME([object_id])
  FROM sys.sql_modules
  WHERE definition LIKE '%your_procedure_name%';

This also doesn’t capture calls to the procedure that are built with dynamic SQL, but I don’t think there is a perfect all-encompassing solution for this problem anyway. You can also discover cases where the stored procedure is being called by a job:

SELECT j.name FROM msdb.dbo.sysjobs AS j
  INNER JOIN msdb.dbo.sysjobsteps AS s
  ON j.job_id = s.job_id
  WHERE s.command LIKE '%your_procedure_name%';

(Same caveats exist for false positives and dynamic SQL there, as well as nested procedure calls which won’t be caught even if they are relevant.)

Some other ideas:

• Red-Gate has a free tool called SQL Search or, probably more appropriately, SQL Dependency Tracker.
• There is a free version of SQL Digger but the pro version is required for stored procedures.
• You can try the dependency viewer in Management Studio, but I don’t really trust the underlying data.