Question

I’ve found myself in a position where I’m working an unfamiliar database that has a vast number of columns to each table. I have an idea of what data I’m looking for but I don’t know what column it resides in and need to use like in order to locate the exact data that I need (and have to repeat this task for multiple sets of data).

Is there a way to apply like over a cartesian select?

The following should explain what I’d like to do a bit better (even though it’s syntactically ridiculous):

select 
    *
from    
    a_table
where   
    * like '%x%'

edit:

Note that I’m not intending on using a cartesion select in any reports – it’s purposes here would be to help me to identify the relevant columns that I would need to put into my queries and to help me gain familiarity with the database.

Answer 1

Generally – its not possible in reasonable way (without digging in DB metadata), but if you know the names of columns, you may use trick like this:

select 
    YourTable.*
FROM YourTable
JOIN
( 
    select 
      id, 
      ISNULL(column1,'')+ISNULL(Column2,'')+...+ISNULL(ColumnN,'') concatenated
      FROM YourTable
) T ON T.Id = YourTable.Id
where   t.concatenated like '%x%'

OR

if you search for words – use the FTS capabilities, because the upper query is a performance killer