Greg Low wants to know how things tie together:
This post describes how the object dependency tracking views provide more reliable insights into object dependencies than previous methods such as the use of the sp_depends system stored procedure.
During a recent consulting engagement, I was asked about the best way to determine which stored procedures and views made use of a particular table. In the past, the methods available from within SQL Server were not very reliable. Way back in SQL Server 2008, significant improvements were made in this area, yet I see so few people using them, at least not directly. Many will use them indirectly via SSMS.
In this post, let’s explore the problems with the previous mechanisms (that are still retained for backwards compatibility) and then see how the object dependency views improve the situation.
The dependency DMVs that Greg lands on are much better than sp_depends, for sure, but don’t expect them to know about cross-instance dependencies.