Stored procedures reverse engineering

Question

We\'re having problem with a huge number of legacy stored procedures at work. Do you guys recommend any tool the can help better understand those procedures? Some kind of re

Answer 1

I think the Red Gate Dependency Tracker mentioned by rpetrich is a decent solution, it works well and Red Gate has 30 day trial (ideally long enough for you do do your forensics).

I would also consider isolating the system and running the SQL Profiler which will show you all the SQL action on the tables. This is often a good starting point for building a sequence diagram or however you choose to document these codes. Good luck!

Answer 2

How to find the dependency chain of a database object (MS SQL Server 2000(?)+) by Jacob Sebastian

Every time he needs to deploy a new report or modify an existing report, he needs to know what are the database objects that depend on the given report stored procedure. Some times the reports are very complex and each stored procedure might have dozens of dependent objects and each dependent object may be depending on other dozens of objects.

He needed a way to recursively find all the depending objects of a given stored procedure. I wrote a recursive query using CTE to achieve this.