Find Text Inside a Stored Procedure or Used Defined Function

How to find text inside a stored procedure or user defined function

One of the most useful stored procedures I have in my toolkit that I find myself using over and over on any system that I work on is the following procedure that allows me to return a list of stored procedures and user defined functions that contain a particular string of text.

I maybe looking for all procs or UDF's that contain a table or view name or need a list of all procs that do have SET NOCOUNT ON so that I can find those that don't or I may just be looking for a particular variable name or comment within all my procs and functions.

It makes use of the system view syscomments which stores all the text within the stored procedures and user defined functions contained within your SQL Server database. This is just another example of how having knowledge of the system views is a very useful skill to know.

The code is below.

CREATE PROCEDURE [dbo].[usp_sql_find_string_in_proc_or_udf]

@FindStr AS VARCHAR(500)

AS

SET NOCOUNT ON

SELECT DISTINCT NAME AS [NAME],
 CASE  WHEN TYPE ='P' THEN 'PROCEDURE'
     WHEN TYPE IN('FN', 'IF','TF') THEN 'FUNCTION'
 END AS OBJECTTYPE
FROM SYSCOMMENTS as comm
JOIN sysobjects as obj
ON comm.id = obj.id and obj.type IN ('P','FN', 'IF', 'TF')
WHERE lower(TEXT) LIKE '%' + ltrim(rtrim(lower(@FindStr))) + '%'

You call it simply like so:

EXEC dbo.usp_sql_find_string_in_proc_or_udf 'SOME_TABLE'

EXEC dbo.usp_sql_find_string_in_proc_or_udf '@ErrorVar varchar(100)'

It's one of those simple procedures that are very handy to have and save a lot of time. Being able to find a piece of text within all your stored procedures and functions quickly could literally save you hours of hunting about on a large system.