Good morning,
We are considering the possibility of upgrading from MSFT SQL 2000 to 2005. I am trying to run a windows file search on our code base, but it looks like searching for '*=' doesn't work right off the bat. Perhaps the * is some kind of wildcard?
Any help is appreciated, -Alan.
Get yourself a copy of Cygwin and use "real" search tools like grep :-) I've never trusted Windows search since I'm fairly certain it only searches within registered file types (although that may have changed since the last time I looked).
The command-line findstr seems to work better across all file types, so you can use something like:
findstr /s /l "*=" *.sql
in your top-level directory. The /s tells it to search all subdirectories and the /l means literal search. It can even do regular expressions if you're so inclined - run findstr /? from the command line for details.
Where are your queries stored? If they're procedures in the database, no file-based search will help you. If they're in your client code, use the search feature in your IDE. If they're really in sql files on disk, that would seem very odd to me.
To search for stored procs that contain the dreaded =* or *= you can use some variant of this
select o.name,c.text
FROM yourdatabase..syscomments c(NOLOCK)
JOIN yourdatabase..sysobjects o(NOLOCK) ON c.id=o.id
where text like '%*=%' or text like '%=*%'
Replace your database name of course.
To expand on my comment earlier about how you need to find and fix whether you upgrade or not, SQL Server 2000 is broken when it comes to the use of =* or *=. SOmetimes it interpets them as outer joins and sometimes it intreprets them as cross joins which gives an entirely different result set. This behavior is so bad that it is not recomemended that this syntax ever be used in any verion of SQL server from 2000 on up (I can't speak for ealier versions)