Check Validity of SQL Server Stored Procedures/Views/Functions (updated)

• Download demo - 7.78 KB
• Download source - 29.34 KB

Introduction

This is an updated version of the code posted by IPC2000. The following changes have been made:

• References to the enterprise library have been removed, allowing for more flexibility in specifying the connection string. Connection strings and verbosity can be specified on the command line.
• Output is more "spreadsheet friendly", using tab delimited output that can be copy/pasted into Excel
• Support for SQL 2005 has been introduced. Separation of user from schema in SQL 2005 requires a slightly different SQL statement.
• Validation logic has been moved to a separate class which allows for referencing/use in another project. This is especially handy for inclusion as an NUnit test.

Background

Please refer to this article for more background on the validation. This is simply a polished version of that piece.

Using the Code

The console executable can be run specifying a /c:<connection string> argument as well as a /v:<verbosity> argument. Verbosity values are:

• Quiet: Designed for spreadsheets, a tab delimited list of invalid objects
• Normal (default): Includes some description of what's going on. Version of SQL Server detected and a summary of objects processed and object failures
• Verbose: Code will list every object processed as it's processing it 

Update

A new switch, /x, has been added to ask the program to actually run any procedure, function, view it thinks is safe.  If CREATE, DROP, INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE, or EXEC/EXECUTE appears in the text of the object it will move on, otherwise, it will add a dummy value for each parameter it finds and execute the object.  Since the logic isn't perfect (stored procs can call functions that do bad things), this is turned off by default, but enabling it should generally be safe if the system was coded using best practices.  This feature has limited testing behind it - please comment below if you find issues and I'll take a look when I can.

You can also reference the executable directly into NUnit and run the corresponding method. Here's an example C# test method:

[TestFixture]
public class DatabaseValidation
{
    [Test]
    public void CheckForDatabaseCompilationProblems()
    {
	Assert.IsTrue(
	DatabaseValidator.Validator.DatabaseIsValid(
	ConfigurationManager.ConnectionStrings
	[MyConnectionString].ConnectionString,
	DatabaseValidator.Verbosity.Normal),
	"Invalid objects found in the database - Run SqlValidator");
    } 
} 

History

• 2008-05-02: Initial post