Monthly Archives: September 2014

Continuing with last week's post about Helper Stored Procedures, I wanted to introduce two more that I use frequently. The first one is a built in stored procedure (  using SQL Server) called 'sp_helptext'. This stored procedure allows you to view the content of other stored procedures (SP) and more, here is a link to the Microsoft documentation. Here is an example of how you use it:

sp_helptext @objname='sp_helptext'

This will show you the contents of sp_helptext  by using it. This comes in very handy as a keyboard shortcut. I assigned mine to 'Ctrl+3'.  Often I have a SP that does data manipulation and puts the final data in a table that occurs as the last step of my SP. I may not remember which table the data goes into, but I can simply highlight the SP ( I typically double click) and then use 'Ctrl+3' and the contents of the SP appears in my results tab. This also works nicely for function and triggers that you might use.

Another piece of information that I am often curious about is how large is a particular table. If you like going through menus, then you can left click on a table name in the object explorer and choose properties. Then select 'storage' from the left navigation menu. You will see under the 'general' section: "Data Space","Row Count" and "Index Space". While this is okay if you only perform this task once a month, it takes way to long if you are running this 5 + times per day. I wrote a stored procedure called 'sp_tablesize' that is a wrapper for another Microsoft SP, that is sp_spaceused.

USE [YourDatabase]
GO

SET ANSI_NULLS ON
GO

SET QUOTED_IDENTIFIER ON
GO


Alter Procedure [dbo].[TableSize_Sp]
@TableName varchar(500)
as


If object_id(@Tablename,'U') is not null
Begin
If Object_ID('tempdb..#TableSummary','U') Is Not Null  
Drop Table #TableSummary

CREATE TABLE #TableSummary
(
[database] varchar(500) default db_name(),
table_name sysname ,
row_count BIGINT,
reserved_size VARCHAR(50),
data_size VARCHAR(50),
index_size VARCHAR(50),
unused_size VARCHAR(50),
[timestamp] datetime default getdate() not null,
Calendardate as convert(datetime,convert(varchar,[timestamp],101))
)

Declare @Sql varchar(max)
Set @Sql='
INSERT #TableSummary ([table_name],[row_count],[reserved_size],[data_size],[index_size],[unused_size])
EXEC sp_spaceused''' + @TableName + '''
'

Exec (@Sql)

If Object_ID('tempdb..#TableSummaryCleaned','U') is not null
Drop Table #TableSummaryCleaned
Select
	a.[Database],
	a.table_name [TableName],
	round(sum(cast(a.row_count as bigint)),2)[Rows],
	round(sum(cast(reserved_size_kb as float)/1024),2)ReservedSizeMB,
	round(sum(cast(data_size_kb as float)/1024),2)DataSizeMB,
	round(sum(cast(index_size_kb as float)/1024),2)IndexSizeMB,
	round(sum(cast(unused_size_kb as float)/1024),2)UnusedSizeMB,
	[Timestamp],
	Calendardate
Into #TableSummaryCleaned	
From
	(
	Select 
		[database],
		table_name ,
		row_count,
		cast(replace(reserved_size, ' KB','') as bigint) reserved_size_kb,
		cast(replace(data_size, ' KB','') as bigint) data_size_kb,
		cast(replace(index_size, ' KB','') as bigint) index_size_kb,
		cast(replace(unused_size, ' KB','') as bigint) unused_size_kb,
		[timestamp],
		[calendardate]
	From #TableSummary
	)a
Group By 
	a.[database],
	a.table_name,
	[Timestamp],
	Calendardate

Alter Table #TableSummaryCleaned
Add TotalMB float

Update #TableSummaryCleaned 
Set TotalMB = ReservedSizeMB 

Alter Table #TableSummaryCleaned
Add TotalGB float

Update #TableSummaryCleaned
Set TotalGB =TotalMB/1024 

Select *
From #TableSummaryCleaned
End
Else
Begin
	Declare @ErrorText varchar(500)
	Set @ErrorText = @TableName+' is not a valid table.'
 RAISERROR(@ErrorText, 16, 1)
End

GO

After you create the SP 'tablesize_SP' you can assign it to a shortcut in SSMS. I choose to use 'Ctrl+4' for myself. We can create a table and add data and an index to make sure that our new SP works.

Create Table dbo.TestTable
( numbers float )


-- Create Table with numbers 1 -100
Declare @Counter int
Set @Counter=1
While @Counter <=1000
Begin
    Insert Into dbo.TestTable Select @counter*1000
    Set @Counter=@Counter+1
End

-- Check Table Size
exec tablesize_sp'TestTable'

-- Create Index
Create NonClustered Index [NC_Numbers] on dbo.TestTable
(numbers)

-- Check size after creating index
exec tablesize_sp'TestTable'

You will notice that our index size increased after adding one, which is to be expected. Hopefully this will allow you to quickly check the size of a table. Combine that with 'sp_helptext' and 'sp_top10' you can find out a lot of information about a table quite quickly. Let me leave you with a quick reference guide of which SP to use depending on what you want to know.

Note: SSMS 2012 was used for this example.