Finding Column Dependencies in SQL server 2005

If you need to make small changes to an existing database object, then you will need to do some impact assessment to determine what SQL Server Objects will be affected by your small change.We need to determine column dependencies within database as well as these dependencies across different databases.

Using the SYSCOMMENTS table:
The actual code for views, rules, defaults, triggers, CHECK constraints, DEFAULT constraints and stored procedures are stored in the syscomments table. The column TEXT in the syscomments table contains the actual code for all these objects. Knowing this allows you to write some simple T-SQL code that can scan the syscomments table looking for an actual table column name or database object name that you are planning on changing. By scanning the syscomments table, you will be able to narrow the focus of your impact analysis down to only those objects that might be affected by your change.

e.g
select name
from syscomments c
join sysobjects o on c.id = o.id
where TEXT like '%Titles%' and TEXT like '%Title_Id%' -- we are determining in which objects Title_Id column of Titles table is used.

This query looks for syscomments rows that contain both the string "Title_Id " and "titles" in the same record. With this query, I find all syscomments records that contain both a reference to the table and column that I planned on changing. This query joins the syscomments and sysobjects table so that the object name can be displayed in the results.

Using the sp_depends Stored Procedure:
SQL Sever maintains a database system table named sysdepends. SQL Server uses this table to store object dependencies. This table only contains information about objects that are dependent upon other objects. It does not contain detailed dependency information, such as which attributes of an object are referenced by other objects. Even so, you can use the information in the sysdepends table to help narrow down your impact analysis when you are making a schema change.

To access the sysdepends table information SQL Server provides the sp_depends system stored procedure.
e.g. EXEC sp_depends 'Titles'

Lets say , it return objects dbo.titleview , GetAllTitles

This will return all objects that are dependent on the table name "Titles."

Now run below query to get all objects which use column Title_id.

select distinct object_name(id) from sys.syscomments
where TEXT like '%Titles%' and TEXT like '%Title_Id%'
and object_name(id) in (
'GetAllTitles',
'titleview'
')


Not All Code is Stored in SQL Server
Now keep in mind the syscomments and sp_depends methods may not find all your code that is affected by a schema change. These two methods are only able to scan objects that are stored in SQL Server (views, rules, defaults, triggers, CHECK constraints, DEFAULT constraints, and stored procedures). If you have written your application code in such a way that allows you to issue T-SQL SELECT, UPDATE, INSERT and DELETE statements in code blocks that are not stored in SQL Server, then you will need to use other methods for scanning this code. Hopefully where you store the code for your application outside SQL Server is in a repository or file structure of some kind where you can do a global find or search of some kind.


When you are making a database schema change, it is important to identify all the objects that might be affected by the change. Without doing a complete impact assessment, you run the risk of causing problems when implementing your schema change. Therefore having some easy, and automated method to help identify the objects that will be impacted by your schema change is critical, and a time saver. The next time you are doing some impact analysis associated with a schema change to your database, you might consider using one or all the methods I discussed to help narrow down the objects impacted by your proposed change.