Chapter 21. Administrative Stored Procedures

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Generally, management of many is the same as management of few. It is a matter of organization.

Sun Tzu ^[1]

^[1] Tzu, Sun. The Art of War . Cambridge, England: Oxford University Press, 1963. Page 90.

In this chapter we'll explore building administrative stored procedures. Although SQL Server comes with a large number of documented and undocumented stored procedures, there always seems to be a need for one more. That's what this chapter is about. It shows you some of the techniques you can use to build administrative code by taking you on a tour of several administrative routines that I've built. These routines demonstrate techniques that you can use in your own work and provide code that you may find useful as well. Several of them build on one another. For example, sp_generate_script uses sp_readtextfile, and sp_diffdb uses sp_generate_script and sp_diff. Many of these routines are connected in some way. Study them, run them yourself, and see if you can think of similar routines you might build on your own. Take some of the techniques I've used in these procedures and build new procedures that make your life as a SQL Server practitioner easier.

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