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Using Powershell To Find Linked Server References

Drew Furgiuele shows us how we can use the sqlserver Powershell module to find linked server references in code:

SQL Search is doing exactly what it’s designed to do here: it’s finding every object that matches that string, HumanResources. It’s unfortunate that it also happens to be the name of my linked server and a schema in my database, but such is life, right? Its returning every object it hits a match on, which includes a bunch of views, plus one of those views actually contains my linked server reference.

I love SQL Search

Let me be clear: I’m not here to gang up on the fine folks at Redgate. This tool is beautiful and I love it. Otherwise, how else could we quickly search for objects in our databases? The alterative would be either querying system views for object definitions or using cursors to call sp_helptext over and over, and then trying to do pattern matching. Same as what SQL Search does.

There’s no easy way to sort this wheat from chaff, is there? This might be a starting point; let’s narrow down the search the objects we might need to look at. Then, we’ll manually script each one out, one at a time. That sounds an awful lot like a manual process. “If only there was a way to automate this checking”, he asked, sarcastically.

Click through for a very interesting cmdlet.