Tonight was trying to install an upgrade for my customer. In the process, we discovered a stored procedure that I couldn’t move to the new database because it referenced fields that no longer existed. The question is: was it still being used?

I searched for it in VS.NET – no luck. But perhaps it was being referenced from another stored procedure.

That’s when I was reminded of the first coding zone of suck. How could I search through all these stored procedures, other than to script them to my computer and search the files. Lame.

(There used to be a tool that did this. I can’t find it now. People are welcome to remind me. But by the way, I shouldn’t need a special tool.  Ugh.)

Then I thought…well perhaps it used to be referenced in an older version of the code, but we stopped using it and forgot to delete the stored procedure. So maybe I could just search Vault, my handy-dandy source code control software.

Nope. The second zone of suck. Vault does not support searching the code like this. (It doesn’t really surprise me. That would be a tricky thing, since Vault only stores the deltas. But it still sucks.)