Quote:
I've tried using this statement below
to find an appropriate column based on
what I think it should be named but it
returned no results.*
SELECT * from dba_objects WHERE
object_name like '%DTN%'
A column isn't an object. If you mean that you expect the column name to be like '%DTN%', the query you want is:
SELECT owner, table_name, column_name FROM all_tab_columns WHERE column_name LIKE '%DTN%';
But if the 'DTN' string is just a guess on your part, that probably won't help.
By the way, how certain are you that '1/22/2008P09RR8' is a value selected directly from a single column? If you don't know at all where it is coming from, it could be a concatenation of several columns, or the result of some function, or a value sitting in a nested table object. So you might be on a wild goose chase trying to check every column for that value. Can you not start with whatever client application is displaying this value and try to figure out what query it is using to obtain it?
Anyway, diciu's answer gives one method of generating SQL queries to check every column of every table for the value. You can also do similar stuff entirely in one SQL session using a PL/SQL block and dynamic SQL. Here's some hastily-written code for that:
SET SERVEROUTPUT ON SIZE 100000
DECLARE
match_count INTEGER;
BEGIN
FOR t IN (SELECT owner, table_name, column_name
FROM all_tab_columns
WHERE owner <> 'SYS' and data_type LIKE '%CHAR%') LOOP
EXECUTE IMMEDIATE
'SELECT COUNT(*) FROM ' || t.owner || '.' || t.table_name ||
' WHERE '||t.column_name||' = :1'
INTO match_count
USING '1/22/2008P09RR8';
IF match_count > 0 THEN
dbms_output.put_line( t.table_name ||' '||t.column_name||' '||match_count );
END IF;
END LOOP;
END;
/
There are some ways you could make it more efficient too.
In this case, given the value you are looking for, you can clearly eliminate any column that is of NUMBER or DATE type, which would reduce the number of queries. Maybe even restrict it to columns where type is like '%CHAR%'.
Instead of one query per column, you could build one query per table like this:
SELECT * FROM table1
WHERE column1 = 'value'
OR column2 = 'value'
OR column3 = 'value'
...
;
