Question

Red Gate has some pretty good tools, but I don’t think that their Dependency Tracker shows how Tables are effected by the stored procedures that touch them.

Is there any tool that can scan a database and determine what processes INSERT, UPDATE or DELETE records from the table as opposed to just touching\being dependent on them? Seems like this shuld exist by now…

Answer 1

No, dependency tracking still isn’t perfect. The reason is that procedures can reference tables by dynamic SQL, dependencies can be broken if objects are dropped and re-created (I’ve written about how dependencies can break here). The best "first sweep" I have come to rely on is:

SELECT OBJECT_NAME([object_id]) 
  FROM sys.sql_modules
  WHERE LOWER(definition) LIKE '%table_name%';

Again, this won’t find objects that build statements using dynamic SQL, and it can produce false positives because table_name could be simplistic and part of other object or parameter names, or included only in comments or commented-out code.

You can also check for plans that reference a table using sys.dm_exec_cached_plans and related DMFs/DMVs but note that this won’t find any plans that have rolled out of the cache.