How can I find all columns of a certain type (for example NTEXT) in all tables in a SQL Server database?
I am looking for a SQL query.
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5 Answers
You can use following query to return fields
SELECT table_name [Table Name], column_name [Column Name]
FROM information_schema.columns where data_type = 'NTEXT'
3 Comments
Daniel
This will also include views
JP Hellemons
This will also work on Azure SQL (aug 2018) and I used it to convert columns to nvarchar(max) because NText will be deprecated.
alter table [tablename] alter column [columnname] nvarchar(max). You can use LEN(..) etc. with nvarchar and not ntext.
Mike P.
@Daniel if you don't want views included, inner join on information_schema.tables, like so:
INNER JOIN INFORMATION_SCHEMA.TABLES t ON c.TABLE_NAME = t.TABLE_NAME AND t.TABLE_TYPE = 'BASE TABLE'You're going to need INFORMATION_SCHEMA. Try something like:
SELECT c.* from INFORMATION_SCHEMA.columns c
INNER JOIN INFORMATION_SCHEMA.tables t ON t.table_name = c.table_name
WHERE c.data_type = 'int' AND t.table_type = 'base table'
Comments
Also you can try
SELECT OBJECT_NAME(c.OBJECT_ID) TableName, c.name ColumnName
FROM sys.columns AS c
JOIN sys.types AS t ON c.user_type_id=t.user_type_id
WHERE t.name = 'ntext'
ORDER BY c.OBJECT_ID;
GO
Comments
I did use the following Statement to find all tables that could possibly hold binary-data/files.
SELECT
table_name
FROM
INFORMATION_SCHEMA.TABLES T
WHERE
T.TABLE_CATALOG = 'MyDatabase' AND
EXISTS (
SELECT *
FROM INFORMATION_SCHEMA.COLUMNS C
WHERE
C.TABLE_CATALOG = T.TABLE_CATALOG AND
C.TABLE_SCHEMA = T.TABLE_SCHEMA AND
C.TABLE_NAME = T.TABLE_NAME AND
( C.DATA_TYPE = 'binary' OR
C.DATA_TYPE = 'varbinary' OR
C.DATA_TYPE = 'text' OR
C.DATA_TYPE = 'ntext' OR
C.DATA_TYPE = 'image' )
)
Comments
You can use the system view INFORMATION_SCHEMA.COLUMNS. The data_type column has what you're looking for.
