A better sp_MSForEachDB

Though undocumented and unsupported, I’m sure that at least once you happened to use Microsoft’s built-in stored procedure to execute a statement against all databases. Let’s face it: it comes handy very often, especially for maintenance tasks.

Some months ago, Aaron Bertand (blog|twitter) came up with a nice replacement and I thought it would be fun to code my own.

The main difference with his (and Microsoft’s) implementation is the absence of a cursor. While flagged correctly (LOCAL FORWARD_ONLY STATIC READ_ONLY) and run against a temporary table, nevertheless I was a bit disturbed by that tiny little cursor, so I decided to get rid of it.

Basically, my code relies on a dynamic SQL pushed down three levels:

sp_executesql
sp_executesql
EXEC

This trick can be used as many times as you like, given that you keep on declaring and passing all the parameters you need to the lower levels.

I didn’t provide ad-hoc parameters to implement complex filters on sysdatabases, as I’m convinced that they would not be useful enough in a day to day use. If you like this code and want to use it, feel free to change it to incorporate any kind of filter.

Here is the code:

Let’s see some examples of its use: Print the database name for each user database:

EXEC [dba_ForEachDB] @statement = 'PRINT DB_NAME()', @replacechar = '?', @name_pattern =  '[USER]'

Display the file path of each database file of system databases:

EXEC [dba_ForEachDB] @statement = 'SELECT physical_name, size FROM sys.database_files', @replacechar = '?', @name_pattern =  '[SYSTEM]'

I hope you like it and find it useful. Happy coding.

Archived WordPress comments (8)

Historical comments from the original site; this archive is read-only.

Jason Brimhall (@sqlrnnr) December 5, 2011 at 18:24
Gianluca - thanks for the script. When looking at trying to not use MSforeachdb recently I was going to venture down this same path. You just saved me a bunch of work.
spaghettidba December 5, 2011 at 18:27
Thanks! Glad you liked it, Jason.
Erez August 22, 2013 at 20:49
This works for me. thanks a lot !
Erez
Anon February 17, 2014 at 07:56
Thanks, but I got some problem. I don´t think it handles dbname with multiple - in the name.
I got these databases and it failes can´t find X123456.

X123456-XXXX
X123456-YYY
X123456-CashM
X123456-XXXX-Demo50B
X123456-YYY-Demo50B
X123456-XXXX-CUR
1. spaghettidba February 17, 2014 at 09:54
  I just tried with the database names you suggested and it works for me.
  Can you provide the whole set of parameters you are using?
  Which version are you running?
2. corey Lawson September 13, 2016 at 00:02
  put square brackets around the string, or use QUOTENAME('[', objname), for building up your SQL string.
  1. corey Lawson September 13, 2016 at 00:04
    put square brackets around the parts in the SQL string for field names, table names or database names, or use QUOTENAME('[', objname), for building up your SQL string
    
    as in:
    
    @sql = 'select * from [' + @dbname + '].dbo.[' + @tbl + '];'
    
    or
    
    @sql = 'select * from ' + quotename('[', @dbname) + '.dbo.'+quotename('[', @tbl)+';'
mobile November 20, 2019 at 00:23
In a "It's better than nothing" mindset we ran a COPY_ONLY backup of every database on our servers in the dark of the early morning. This is not a great plan but it was not for production data either. Now if that has got gotten the ire of folks raised hold onto your hat.

sp_MSForEachDb

See also