Search text in fields in every table of a MySQL database

Question

I want to search in all fields from all tables of a MySQL database a given string, possibly using syntax as:

SELECT * FROM * WHERE * LIKE \'%stuff%\'
         


        

Answer 1

In case 23 answers is not enough, here are 2 more... Depending on database structure and content, you may find one them to actually be a quick and simple solution.

For fans of shell one-liners, here is a long one (actually on 2 lines to use variables):

cmd='mysql -u Username -pYour_Password -D Your_Database' # <-- Adapt this

$cmd -s -e 'SHOW TABLES' | while read table; do echo "=== $table ==="; $cmd -B -s -e "SELECT * FROM $table" | grep 'Your_Search'; done

Or on multiple lines to make it more readable:

$cmd -s -e 'SHOW TABLES' \
| while read table; do
    echo "=== $table ===";
    $cmd -B -s -e "SELECT * FROM $table" \
    | grep 'Your_Search';
  done

• -s (--silent) is to suppress the column name headers

• -B (--batch) escapes special characters like newlines, so we get the whole record when using grep

And for Perl fans, this will let you use regular expressions:

# perl -MDBI -le '($db,$u,$p)=@ARGV; $dbh=DBI->connect("dbi:mysql:dbname=$db",$u,$p); foreach $table ($dbh->tables()) {print "$table\n"; foreach $r ($dbh->selectall_array("SELECT * FROM $table")) {$_=join("\t", @$r); print $_ if (/Your_Regex/);}}' Your_Database Username Your_Password

Which in a "real" Perl script could be something like this:

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use open qw(:std :utf8);

use DBI;

my $db_host  = 'localhost';
my $db       = 'Your_Database';
my $db_user  = 'Username';
my $db_pass  = 'Your_Password';

my $search    = qr/Your_regex_Search/;


# https://metacpan.org/pod/DBD::mysql
my $dbh = DBI->connect( "dbi:mysql:dbname=$db;host=$db_host", $db_user, $db_pass,
                        { mysql_enable_utf8mb4 => 1 }
) or die "Can't connect: $DBI::errstr\n";


foreach my $table ( $dbh->tables() ) {
    my $sth = $dbh->prepare("SELECT * FROM $table")
        or die "Can't prepare: ", $dbh->errstr;

    $sth->execute
        or die "Can't execute: ", $sth->errstr;

    my @results;

    while (my @row = $sth->fetchrow()) {
        local $_ = join("\t", @row);
        if ( /$search/ ) {
            push @results, $_;
        }
    }

    $sth->finish;

    next unless @results;

    print "*** TABLE $table :\n",
          join("\n---------------\n", @results),
          "\n" . "=" x 20 . "\n";
}

$dbh->disconnect;