Question

I am trying to write a stored procedure that will allow me to write a single SELECT statement that runs on all databases on my SQL Server. (Microsoft SQL 2005)

so far ive come up with the following procedure

set ANSI_NULLS ON
set QUOTED_IDENTIFIER ON
GO

CREATE PROCEDURE [sp_cross_db_query]
@SQLQuery varchar(400)
AS

DECLARE @DB_Name varchar(100)
DECLARE database_cursor CURSOR FOR 

SELECT DatabaseName 
FROM Management.dbo.Customers

OPEN database_cursor

FETCH NEXT FROM database_cursor INTO @DB_Name

WHILE @@FETCH_STATUS = 0 
BEGIN 
    exec(
        'USE [' + @DB_Name + '];' +
        @SQLQuery
        )
       FETCH NEXT FROM database_cursor INTO @DB_Name 
END
CLOSE database_cursor 
DEALLOCATE database_cursor

to run the query

  exec sp_cross_db_query 'SELECT count(*) FROM Products'

by this i can count all products over all the databases, the problem is the way i get my data returned. now i get several ‘windows’ that holds the result witch is quite unmanageable.
so my question is, how can i get a result very much like a SELECT .., UNION SELECT .., UNION SELECT ..? (in other words one result table)?

i had thoughts about creating a temporary table inside the procedure, what do you think?

Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

Possibly dynamic SQL

DECLARE @DynSQL nvarchar(max)

select 
@DynSQL = isnull(@DynSQL + ' UNION ALL ','') + 
'SELECT count(*) AS ProdCnt  FROM ' + quotename(name) + '..Products'
 from sys.databases
 WHERE state= 0 AND is_in_standby=0 AND database_id>4 /*Exclude Offline and System 
                                                        databases*/

PRINT @DynSQL /*For Debugging or use the next line if the print output is truncated*/
SELECT @DynSQL AS [processing-instruction(x)] FOR XML PATH('')

EXEC sp_executesql @DynSQL