Search the whole database

Question

Hi
I was tasked to search the whole database (all schemas, all tables) for hard-coded IP addresses and host names.
I would divide the problem into two:
1) how to search the whole database
2) how to search for ip addresses - I've heard about 10g feature of regular expressions but AFAIK it is not the case of pre-10g db.
Could you gimme the hint how to do it?
Regards
Paul G. Matuszyk

Answer 1

Aside from a general caveat that if you don't know the data model well enough to be able to figure out the handful of columns in the handful of tables that might contain IP addresses and host names, any solution to this problem is going to be incomplete and miss some corner cases...
You can search the entire database by writing dynamic SQL, i.e.
FOR x IN (SELECT * FROM dba_tab_cols WHERE data_type IN ('CHAR', 'VARCHAR2')
LOOP
  EXECUTE IMMEDIATE 'SELECT COUNT(*) FROM ' || x.owner || '.' || x.table_name || WHERE isHostName( ' || x.column_name || ') = 1' INTO l_cnt;
  IF( l_cnt > 0 )
  THEN
    <<do something>>
  END IF;
END LOOP;This assumes that you have functions like isHostName and isIPAddress and that you can restrict your search to CHAR and VARCHAR2 columns.
Identifying a host name seems rather difficult unless you know that it is a fully qualified host name (i.e. <<host>>.foo.com) rather than the more common approach of assuming the .foo.com bit in an internal application.
Identifying an IP address can be a challenge as well. It's possible that someone would have stored it in 4 separate columns rather than in a VARCHAR2 column as 4 numbers separated by periods. Assuming the latter, though, you can use INSTR and SUBSTR to parse a string looking for periods and then see if the string between periods are numeric.
Of course, this solution is also going to be extremely slow, since you're going to be full scanning just about every table in the database, possibly multiple times.
Justin