Stored procedures and the tables used by them - sql

Question

Is there a way to know what are the tables used by one stored procedure by doing an SQL query?
Best regards, and thanks for the help.
P.S.: I'm using SQL Server 2005.

Answer 1

This article on TechRepublic
Finding dependencies in SQL Server 2005
describes a way to do that:
This tutorial will show how you can
write a procedure that will look up
all of the objects that are dependent
upon other objects.
Here is the code to create the system stored procedure for finding object dependencies:
USE master
GO
CREATE PROCEDURE sp_FindDependencies
(
#ObjectName SYSNAME,
#ObjectType VARCHAR(5) = NULL
)
AS
BEGIN
DECLARE #ObjectID AS BIGINT
SELECT TOP(1) #ObjectID = object_id
FROM sys.objects
WHERE name = #ObjectName
AND type = ISNULL(#ObjectType, type)
SET NOCOUNT ON ;
WITH DependentObjectCTE (DependentObjectID, DependentObjectName, ReferencedObjectName, ReferencedObjectID)
AS
(
SELECT DISTINCT
sd.object_id,
OBJECT_NAME(sd.object_id),
ReferencedObject = OBJECT_NAME(sd.referenced_major_id),
ReferencedObjectID = sd.referenced_major_id
FROM
sys.sql_dependencies sd
JOIN sys.objects so ON sd.referenced_major_id = so.object_id
WHERE
sd.referenced_major_id = #ObjectID
UNION ALL
SELECT
sd.object_id,
OBJECT_NAME(sd.object_id),
OBJECT_NAME(referenced_major_id),
object_id
FROM
sys.sql_dependencies sd
JOIN DependentObjectCTE do ON sd.referenced_major_id = do.DependentObjectID
WHERE
sd.referenced_major_id <> sd.object_id
)
SELECT DISTINCT
DependentObjectName
FROM
DependentObjectCTE c
END
This procedure uses a Common Table
Expression (CTE) with recursion to
walk down the dependency chain to get
to all of the objects that are
dependent on the object passed into
the procedure. The main source of data
comes from the system view
sys.sql_dependencies, which contains
dependency information for all of your
objects in the database.

Answer 2

Try sp_depends, although you should probably recompile the stored procedure to update the statistics in the database.

Answer 3

Look up sp_depends system stored proc.

Answer 4

I think that as long as the stored procedure and the tables are all in the same database then you can right click on the procedure in SSMS and click "View Dependencies". I don't know the query behind the dialog though...

Answer 5

As others indicated you can use the Dependancies stored procedures; however, in my experience and this was back on SQL Server 2000, the depandancies were not always reliable. In some cases they weren't being updated. You can always go to the sysComments table assuming your schema is not encrypted.
declare #crlfSearch varchar(max),#objectSearch varchar(max),#escapeSearch varchar(max)
set #crlfSearch=('%bid' + char(13)+'%')
set #objectSearch='%bid %'
set #escapeSearch ='%[[]Bid]%'
select distinct so.name
from syscomments sc
inner join sysobjects so
on sc.id=so.id
where text like #objectSearch or text like #crlfSearch
or text like #escapesearch
This query looks for three common cases you might have to add some but basically we find where the table name has a space after it, (This helps to limit cases where the table name is part of another table name), Has a return at the end of it, or is escaped within brackets.