you could search for words that exist after "FROM" and "JOIN", right? and that should get the tables, regardless of the prefix?

I'm playing wiht a splitting with a delimited split, and joining it against itself to get the tables?

this seems to work:

create table #temp1 (query nvarchar(max))

insert into #temp1

values (' SELECT * FROM dbo.table1')

, (' SELECT col1, col23 FROM dbo.table2 a join dbo.table3 b on a.col1 = b.col1')

insert into #temp1

values (' SELECT * FROM table1')

, (' SELECT col1, col23 FROM table2 a join table3 b on a.col1 = b.col1')

SELECT * FROM #temp1

CROSS APPLY dbo.DelimitedSplit8K(query,' ') T1

CROSS APPLY dbo.DelimitedSplit8K(query,' ') T2

WHERE T1.ItemNumber + 1 = T2.ItemNumber

AND T1.Item IN('JOIN','FROM')