How to Find the list of Stored Procedures which affect a particular column?

Question

Im working on this large DB which has a lot of the business knowledge embedded in the SPs[I know!] and there is a lot of chaining between the SPs. i.e one stored proc callin

Answer 1

use msdb
go
select * from sysjobs j
inner join sysjobsteps s
on j.job_id=s.job_id
where command like '%HBR_INSTRUMENT%'

Answer 2

Have you tried this : EXEC sp_depends @objname = [table name of the column you are interested in].

So for example, if you had a column named Price in a table named Product, you would execute this: EXEC sp_depends @objname = N'Product'.

Simply executing this would give you list of all sps, views, etc which depend on that particular table.

I use this all the time as I work with a db which has over 400 tables :-)

sp_depends page on MSDN

Answer 3

From system view sys.sql_dependencies you can get dependencies at column level.

DECLARE @Schema SYSNAME
DECLARE @Table SYSNAME
DECLARE @Column SYSNAME

SET @Schema = 'dbo'
SET @Table = 'TableName'
SET @Column = 'ColumnName'

SELECT o.name
FROM sys.sql_dependencies AS d
  INNER JOIN sys.all_objects AS o ON o.object_id = d.object_id
  INNER JOIN sys.all_objects AS ro ON ro.object_id = d.referenced_major_id
  INNER JOIN sys.all_columns AS c ON c.object_id = ro.object_id AND c.column_id = d.referenced_minor_id
WHERE (SCHEMA_NAME(ro.schema_id)=@Schema) 
  and o.type_desc = 'SQL_STORED_PROCEDURE'
  and ro.name = @Table
  and c.name = @Column
GROUP BY o.name

Answer 4

Here's one that works in SQL 2000+; Note that as Andrew noted in his, you will get false positives depending on your column name, but it's a starting place:

SELECT DISTINCT o.Name
FROM syscomments c
    JOIN sysobjects o ON c.ID = o.ID
WHERE c.Text LIKE '%ColumnName%'
ORDER BY o.Name

Answer 5

Try something like this:

use YourDatabase;

select [Name]    
from sys.procedures
where object_definition([object_id]) like '%YourColumnName%';

Obviously this has the potential to generate a lot of false positives depending on what the column is named but at least you will have a list of procedures to sift through.