I’ve been playing with Red-Gate’s Sql Dependency Viewer which is currently in Beta.  During this beta period, Red-Gate  is allowing people to download the tool for free.

I’ve run into a few dependency viewers based on sysdepends in various blogs, but I’ve always run into problems with one project I worked on.  The database had so many stored procs, functions and tables that these tools never completed their work after running overnight.  I decided to turn Sql Dependency Viewer on this project and see what it could do. 

I was impressed that it took 20 seconds to read all dependencies.  While the resulting graphical view was nearly unreadable – it looked like something out of Microsoft’s free code profiler for .Net – but it still had a number of extremely useful functions. 

I can give it any object name to search for and it immediately displays the object in question.  When looking at a stored proc, I can immediately see which stored procs are calling it, what stored procs and functions it is calling, what tables it is reading from and what tables it is writing to.  This view is extremely useful in a large project. I would have loved to have had this tool when I first started working on it. 

It’ll be interesting to see this tool progress and any improvements to the graphical display.