find used colums or functions in sql database

you have wrote your own function in several views or stored procedures, but you don't know anymore where you have used it? it can be difficult to find them.

i did it my way :

1. open Microsoft Sql Server Management studio
2. select the target database
3. right click => tasks=> Generate scripts
4. Select the database and press next
5. select where you want to search in for example views and tabels and pess next
6. presss select all to select all tables and press next
7. press selet all to select all viewss and pres next
8. choose for example "script to new query window"
9. press next and finish.
   

does anyone has another or better idea?

Problems & experiences with files

Files can be created by different applications. more and more they all try to follow the standards that are defined by the different institutions. On the other hand there is a wild growing forest of apps where they try to use these standards. Take pdf-files as an example. There are the original adobe apps but you find a lot of pdf programs on sourceforge. When you generate pdf files with the different tools you'll find, you'll see that you get different files. This causes problems.... strange problems....

A Time ago i had a corrupt Word file. i'm sure that the file was created with MS Office 2000. But my 2007 did nothing else then put some messageboxes on the screen. after a while i opened the file with My OpenOffice 3.0 and voilà ... problem solved.

In another situation I had an MS Excel 2003 file opened with my Excel 2007.
Ms Excel 2007 was in compatibility-mode. after i changed the file extension to xlsx file i discovered that the filesize reduced with more than 40%.

here are some other standard Tricks wich you can use in these kind of situations :

• Open and Save

1. open file exported from other program
2. Save file in current program

• open the file and copy it to a new File
  

1. open file
2. Select all
3. copy
4. open new file
5. paste all
6. save new file

• Open it in another application / Generate the file with an other application if possible
• Install Different File viewers.
• Some programs have cleaning options.

1. autocad : purge commands
2. office : repair options

• find the autoRecover files from the application

1. asd files for MS Word
2. xar files for Ms Excel
   

Syslog Server for windows

many applications, appliances and services have an option for logging to a syslog server.
You can setup a vanilla linux server for this. an other option is to use the Aonaware Syslog Daemon.
it is a windows service that runs a syslog server. All the received messages will be parsed to a MS sql server. very handy if you have a windows-only environment.