Question

My goal is to write a SQL Server script (2008 R2 if it matters) that nulls out all values in all tables where the column name contains “Qualifiers”.

E.g. Table A contains columns named “TemperatureQualifiers” and “SalinityQualifiers”. For all rows in that table, those values should be set to null. There are also several other tables that have columns with similar names.

Answer 1

This will generate the update statements for you. You can extend this to execute them as dynamic SQL or simply cut/paste the results to another SSMS query window and run them.

select 'update [' + s.name + '].[' + t.name + '] set [' +  c.name + '] = NULL'
    from sys.columns c
        inner join sys.tables t
            on c.object_id = t.object_id
        inner join sys.schemas s
            on t.schema_id = s.schema_id
    where c.name like '%Qualifiers%'
        and t.type = 'U'