Search for SQL in Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio with Red Gate's SQL Search

If you do any amount of SQL Server development, at some point in time you've come across a situation where you need to search your database for all occurrences of a table, column or some specific SQL statement that might be used in a view, stored procedure, trigger etc. In the past I've ended up just dump the db schema to a SQL file and searched the file manually, but that's pretty slow and not very elegant.

This morning though I found a better way using Red Gate's SQL Search, which is a free add-in for Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio. This add-in (which is currently free, but will eventually be integrated into the commercial SQL Prompt add-in) allows you to quickly search for strings within your database schema. What's really nice is double-clicking on a matching object takes you right to the object in the Object Explorer—which can save you a lot of time when you have a really large database (I work in an application w/several hundred tables!)

If you use SQL Server Management Studio, I highly recommend you download SQL Search and try it out.

NOTE:

If you're using Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio Express version, or you're "The Add-in 'SQL Search 1.0' failed to load or caused an exception. (Error number: 80070002)" when trying to start Management Studio after installing the add-in, you'll need the extensibility.dll installed before the add-in will work. You'll need to un-installing SQL Search, then download and install extensibility.dll and then re-install SQL Search.