Today’s tip is specifically for developers, system administrators, tech support people, etc. who utilize Microsoft’s SQL Server. While SQL Server is incredibly powerful and the provided Management Studio (Express for the free edition) is an excellent tool, a function which is missing is the ability to search all tables in a database for a text value.

While this can be accomplished quite easily via a simple query if you  know the tables you want to search, but what about searching the entire database? If this sounds like something you need, check out this script. I have used it quite a bit and it works very well.

Basically, you just copy the procedure and run it in the database you want to search to create the store procedure. Then run the stored procedure like you would any other. Of course, this can take some time depending on the size of your database, but overall it accomplishes exactly what it says. The author has tested this on SQL 7 and 2000 and I have personally used this on SQL 2005, so I don’t see any reason this would not work on SQL 2008 as well.

If you do any development using Microsoft SQL Server, a really useful tool available is SQL Profiler. This tool allows you to see queries submitted to the database which is useful for measuring performance, fine tuning as well as tracking down and debugging errors. Unfortunately, this tool is not provided with the SQL Express series, on the full and developer versions. This is no problem when you have Profiler for Microsoft SQL Server 2005/2008 Express Edition.

This free utility is open source and does exactly what the enterprise tool does, but does not have all the bell and whistles. For the price though, you can’t beat it.