Have you ever wanted to list out all the databases you have on a server? Well I am going to show you how to do it quickly and easily.
The other day I had completed a migration from a creaky old dinosaur server to a brand new powerful server which always brings a smile on my face as I like new stuff. I stopped all jobs, put the databases into offline, updated my documentation and diarised a week in the future to finish my clean-up work.
The next day my colleague asked me where I had moved the databases as they did not appear to still be on the server. When he listed the databases using the two following procedures it showed that we were 8 databases down which was the same amount I had put into offline mode.
EXEC sp_databases
EXEC sp_helpdb
I took a step back and did a quick manual search on the server which when you have a few thousand databases can take a while. I found all eight databases and came to the realisation that those two stored procedures can’t find offline databases.
I used the below query to get an accurate list of the databases.
SELECT name
FROM sys.sysdatabases
Originally published at https://parvtheitgeek.com on February 12, 2014.
Parv The IT Geek 