A former colleague recently posed a problem to me: “This guy has a table full of table names, and he wants to run a query that unions those tables.” I spent a couple of minutes telling him why it was a bad idea. It’s not a very robust solution, and an incorrect value in your table of tables could cause the query to fail, as could a missing, renamed, or altered column on one of the target tables. In the end, my former colleague was able to argue for an architecture change. However, my curiosity had been piqued.
I ask: “Can it be done in a stored proc?”
Answer: “No.”
Hmmm… now I feel a challenge! (more…)
