Question

I have known for awhile that the “View Dependencies” feature in SQL Server Management Studio is borderline useless as it hardly ever returns all dependencies, however, is there a better alternative? This is a pretty powerful feature for obvious reasons, but if you cannot rely on the results (as is the case with Microsoft), you have to do all the work by hand anyhow, just to be safe.

It seems like this would be pretty easy to implement, are there any tools out there that handle this effectively?

As a side note, does anyone know what is wrong with “View Dependencies”? Is there a specific class of dependencies that it has trouble identifying?

Answer 1

Red Gate has tool called SQL Dependency Tracker that works pretty well.

You can also write a query against the sys.sql_dependencies view which would give some basic info. Similar to this:

SELECT o.name, o.type_desc, p.name, p.type_desc
FROM sys.sql_dependencies d
INNER JOIN sys.objects o
    ON d.object_id = o.object_id
INNER JOIN sys.objects p
    ON d.referenced_major_id = p.object_id

Here is an article about finding dependencies:

Finding dependencies in SQL Server 2005