"grep" through SQL DB?

Not sure exactly what you are looking for......if you are searching a column for a specific string you could do something like:

SELECT mycol
FROM mytable

WHERE mycol like '%grep%'

hmm not sure whether there is a facility like that.. but if you wish to create the queries automagically for this kind of a job then you can do this., are you trying to reverse engineer from an thrid party application DB :)

select 'select * from ' + sysobjects.name + ' where ' + syscolumns.name +' like ''%stringtosearch%'' '
from syscolumns , sysobjects, systypes
where sysobjects.xtype='U' and sysobjects.id = syscolumns.id  and systypes.xtype=syscolumns.xtype
and systypes.name <> 'sysname'
and systypes.name  in ('varchar','char','nvarchar','nchar','text','text')
order by sysobjects.name,syscolumns.colid

IMHO, you should explain the reason why you try to "grep" the whole database. Usually, only a certain set of tables and columns should be searched for, anything else will be - if used/usable by users - a good performance and security killer.

You might create a stored procedure that explicitely searches this given set of tables and columns and returns the data to the user/application.

So far user-dsine
is the closest to what I wanted.
Idealy would be nice if this is all wraped up together
in a storproc or a piece of code
to loop through all the statements and add descriptive output
so it will be obvious which tables/fields the results were found.