Question

I’m sure this might be quite common query but couldn’t find good answer as for now.

Here is my question:

I’ve got a table named Contacts with varchar column Title. Now in the middle of development I want to replace field Title with TitleID which is foreign key to ContactTitles table. At the moment table Contacts has over 60 dependencies (other tables, views functions).

How can I do that the safest and easiest way?

We use: MSSQL 2005, data has already been migrated, just want to change schema.

Edit:

Thanks to All for quick replay.

Like it was mentioned Contacts table has over 60 dependents, but when following query was run, only 5 of them use Title column. Migration script was run, so no data changes required.


/*gets all objects which use specified column */



SELECT Name
FROM syscomments sc
JOIN sysobjects so ON sc.id = so.id
WHERE TEXT LIKE '%Title%' AND TEXT LIKE '%TitleID%'


Then I went through those 5 views and updated them manually.

Answer 1

For Microsoft SQL Server Redgate have a (not free) product that can help with this refactoring http://www.red-gate.com/products/sql_refactor/index.htm

In the past I have managed to do this quite easily (if primitively) by simply getting a list of things to review

SELECT * FROM sys.objects
WHERE OBJECT_DEFINITION(OBJECT_ID) LIKE '%Contacts%' 

(and possibly taking dependencies information into account and filtering by object type)

Scripting all the ones of interest in Management Studio then simply going down the list and reviewing them all and changing the CREATE to ALTER. It should be quite a simple and repetitive change even for 60 possible dependencies. Additionally if you are referring to a non existent column you should get an error message when you run the script to ALTER.

If you use * in your queries or adhoc SQL in your applications obviously things may be a bit more difficult.