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SSCarpal Tunnel
       
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Phil Factor (12/2/2008)
... or a nice article on SSC, Phil. [Wink]
Speaking for the vast silent majority, I'd like to read Phil's article. [BigGrin] OK. It's a deal. I needed a good excuse to publish it! :)
Phil is it comming in Jan '09....
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Right there with Babe
      
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Madhivanan and Jason bring up some good points. Formating! Then if you like LIKE you'll love this. Try a search argument with an embedded RegEx. Search for '*e*' and stand by for a boat load of rows.
I'm pushing to store phone numbers as BigInt. I don't have to dial the dashes why should I have to store them? Oh, and three fields too. Country code, area code, phone number. OK, I know that there are letter on the phone but the phone system could care less.
I have customers that use ISO 8601 dates (20081202 for today). Goes in a char(8). On one hand no messy times. :) A ship date is a ship date. On the other try doing calculations by week. I plan on finding a real good reason for these folks to migrate from 2000 to 2008. The date type has me all a twitter.
ATB
Charles Kincaid
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Right there with Babe
      
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I guess I like the code, so I tweaked it a bit into a SELECT only, and added 'column' filters so you can only search in SELECTED columns (if you know the names ahead)
It's funny we are trying to simulate Full-Text search
AdventureWorks2008 DB
SET @schema = 'Person' SET @TableName = 'Person' SET @Value = 'Xu%' SET @ColumnNames = 'FirstName,LastName' -- can be empty or * for ALL columns
/* CREATE PROCEDURE [dbo].[FindValue] @TableName NVARCHAR(128), /* Must be a valid table or view name, must not be quoted or contain a schema*/ @Value NVARCHAR(4000), /*May contain wildcards*/ @schema NVARCHAR(128) = 'dbo' /*May be left out*/ AS
Sample Execution
Exec FindValue @TableName = 'spt_monitor', @Value = '8', @schema = 'dbo' */
/* If given a string it will finds all rows where any char, varchar, or their Unicode equivalent which contain that string in the selected table or view. Note that this only works on objects which have entries in information_schema.columns, which excludes certain system objects. If given a numeric value it will check those text types for a match as well as numeric types. If given a possible date, it will also check date type. The string that is being searched for may contain wildcard characters such as %. This will NOT search text, ntext, xml, or user defined fields. This may return a row more than once if the search string is found in more than one column in that row. */ DECLARE @TableName NVARCHAR(128), /* Must be a valid table or view name, must not be quoted or contain a schema*/ @Value NVARCHAR(4000), /*May contain wildcards*/ @schema NVARCHAR(128) /*May be left out*/ ,@ColumnNames NVARCHAR(4000) -- list of columns to search for, can be * for ALL
SET @schema = 'Person' SET @TableName = 'Person' SET @Value = 'Xu%' SET @ColumnNames = 'FirstName,LastName' -- can be empty or * for ALL columns SET @ColumnNames = REPLACE(@ColumnNames, ' ', '') -- removes all space /**************************** Declare Variables ***********************/ DECLARE @columns TABLE (ColumnName NVARCHAR(128)) DECLARE @columnsFiltered TABLE (ColumnName NVARCHAR(128))
DECLARE @sql NVARCHAR(MAX)
/************************** Populate Table Variable *****************/ /*Takes the names of string type columns for the selected table */ INSERT INTO @columns (ColumnName) SELECT Column_name FROM INFORMATION_SCHEMA.COLUMNS WHERE Table_schema = @schema AND Table_name = @TableName AND data_type IN ('char', 'nchar', 'varchar', 'nvarchar') /* If it is numeric, also check the numeric fields */ IF ISNUMERIC(@value) = 1 INSERT INTO @columns (ColumnName) SELECT Column_name FROM INFORMATION_SCHEMA.COLUMNS WHERE Table_schema = @schema AND Table_name = @TableName AND data_type IN ('int', 'numeric', 'bigint', 'money', 'smallint', 'smallmoney', 'tinyint', 'float', 'decimal', 'real') IF ISDATE(@value) = 1 INSERT INTO @columns (ColumnName) SELECT Column_name FROM INFORMATION_SCHEMA.COLUMNS WHERE Table_schema = @schema AND Table_name = @TableName AND data_type IN ('datetime', 'smalldatetime')
INSERT INTO @columnsFiltered SELECT ColumnName FROM @columns WHERE (@ColumnNames IN ('*','') OR CHARINDEX(',' + ColumnName + ',', ',' + @ColumnNames + ',') > 0 )
/********************* Prepare dynamic SQL Statement to Execute **********/ SELECT @sql = CASE WHEN @sql IS NULL THEN 'Select ''' + ColumnName + ''' as ContainingColumn, * From ' + QUOTENAME(@Schema) + '.' + QUOTENAME(@TableName) + ' where ' + ColumnName + ' like ''' + @Value + ''' ' WHEN @sql IS NOT NULL THEN @sql + 'UNION ALL Select ''' + ColumnName + ''' as ContainingColumn, * From ' + QUOTENAME(@Schema) + '.' + QUOTENAME(@TableName) + ' where ' + ColumnName + ' like ''' + @Value + ''' ' END FROM @columnsFiltered
/******************* Execute Statement and display results ***********/ --print @sql /* This may be uncommented for testing purposes */ EXEC (@sql)
SQLServerNewbie
MCITP: Database Administrator SQL Server 2005
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Right there with Babe
      
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Jeff Moden (12/2/2008) ... or a nice article on SSC, Phil. ;)
I'll hop on the bandwagon and say I would love to see this article, Phil.
And you are quite correct. I originally wrote the procedure to help me deal with large numbers of "spreadsheet-like" tables with swaths of repeating columns. I am not aware of it actually "failing" on a large table, but it can definitely be painfully slow on large tables
--- Timothy A Wiseman SQL Blog: http://timothyawiseman.wordpress.com/
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SSC-Addicted
      
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Jason Akin (12/2/2008)
This doesn't work for a LIKE condition, but for equalities in a small number of fields, you can use WHERE '411-555-1212' IN (HomePhone, WorkPhone, CellPhone, AltPhone) I've found it useful when looking for a foreign key of a Person Id in several fields like fkLoanOfficerId, fkApprovingOfficerId, fkVerifiedBy etc. You can't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. In some cases it's more expedient to work with the errors of the past, than to attempt a total rewrite of the structure.
+1. The IN list of columns is far better than a bunch of OR conditions. Likewise, if LIKEs are necessary this would be a better alternative:
WHERE (HomePhone+'|'+WorkPhone+'|'+CellPhone+'|'+AltPhone) like '%555-1212%'
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Right there with Babe
      
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timothyawiseman (12/2/2008) ... I am not aware of it actually "failing" on a large table, but it can definitely be painfully slow on large tables
Anything to do with LIKE forcing a table scan? Don't get me wrong. I like this solution as a way around certain problems. I'm looking at adding TEXT and NTEXT column types to your script. I have one of those projects where we store e-mails in a database. I want to do searches where certain words or phrases occur in either the subject, body, or response. They are looking at adding a comment column and your proc would just automatically start looking at that too.
ATB
Charles Kincaid
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Right there with Babe
      
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Madhivanan (12/2/2008) Just want to point out that ISNUMERIC and ISDATE is not reliable
SELECT ISNUMERIC('12d5'),ISDATE('2000')
You are right that they sometimes return positives on things that might not be intended as numbers or dates, but it seems pretty reliable in identifying what SQL will convert into dates or numbers. For instance, it interprets the d as scientific notation exactly like an e and it takes 2000 as the year and defaults to Jan 1.
Still, that may let it return more than intended if not used carefully. Thank you for pointing it out.
--- Timothy A Wiseman SQL Blog: http://timothyawiseman.wordpress.com/
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Ten Centuries
      
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What about an approach that used a generic stored proc to dynamically create static code for a specific table?
That is, the code could handle any table name passed to it, and optionally column(s) to exclude, and would generate code specifically for that table. You execute the resulting code to do the actual search.
That way the code is specific and can be tuned but the flexibility is there to handle to any table, albeit at the cost of one extra step per table.
SQL DBA,SQL Server MVP('07, '08, '09) One man with courage makes a majority. Andrew Jackson
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Forum Newbie
      
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I see this as useful (with some modification) for deciphering Microsoft SharePoint content databases, which are de-normalized to provide generic functionality.
When I create a list in SharePoint and want to get at that list data outside of the SharePoint API I create views, but have figure out what generic column was assigned to hold my data. This is a very tedious task, and if I move the list to another site I have to manually re-map the view.
I can in theory use this type of script to find the columns by creating a control row with specific values, and then run this util to determine the column names.
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Forum Newbie
      
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I enjoyed this article and will definitely use it. I work as a data analyst for an internal audit group, and we often come across data that we know relatively little about. SQL Server is one of the tools we use to handle high volume data, but it is a less-than-perfect audit tool, especially for text searching.
Readers may also be interested in the Levenshtein Edit Distance algorithm, which is useful for finding inexact string matches: http://www.planet-source-code.com/vb/scripts/ShowCode.asp?txtCodeId=502&lngWId=5
Thanks!
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