SQL - Find all UPPER CASE strings

Question

Is there a way i can get all the uppercase strings in column from a table. Like creating a function?

Is it possible to perform case-sensitive queries? In particular, I'd like to find all strings in a certain column that are in upper case. This is what I've tried:

select *
from MyTable
where 
column1 = upper(column1) collate SQL_Latin1_General_CP1_CS_AS

Answer 1

You nailed it the first time.

SELECT * FROM MyTable WHERE Column1 = UPPER(Column1) COLLATE SQL_Latin1_General_CP1_CS_AS

The above is the simplest and appears to be the fastest. It would slow down by putting it into a function and now builtin function exists. The other answers are worth their merit for explanation reasons.

Edit: Part 2 - The original questioner further asked "How do I search all tables & columns in the database?". Here is a quick way to find. If you want to return all fields that have all capitals simply remove "TOP 1" from the procedure below but beware. If you have more than a lot of records you will probably run out of memory.

CREATE PROCEDURE SP_SearchAllTablesForAFieldWithAllCapitals
AS
BEGIN
    CREATE TABLE #Results (ColumnName nvarchar(370), ColumnValue nvarchar(3630))

    SET NOCOUNT ON

    DECLARE @TableName nvarchar(256), @ColumnName nvarchar(128)
    SET  @TableName = ''

    WHILE @TableName IS NOT NULL
    BEGIN
        SET @ColumnName = ''
        SET @TableName = 
        (
            SELECT MIN(QUOTENAME(TABLE_SCHEMA) + '.' + QUOTENAME(TABLE_NAME))
            FROM    INFORMATION_SCHEMA.TABLES
            WHERE       TABLE_TYPE = 'BASE TABLE'
                AND QUOTENAME(TABLE_SCHEMA) + '.' + QUOTENAME(TABLE_NAME) > @TableName
                AND OBJECTPROPERTY(
                        OBJECT_ID(
                            QUOTENAME(TABLE_SCHEMA) + '.' + QUOTENAME(TABLE_NAME)
                             ), 'IsMSShipped'
                               ) = 0
        )

        WHILE (@TableName IS NOT NULL) AND (@ColumnName IS NOT NULL)
        BEGIN
            SET @ColumnName =
            (
                SELECT MIN(QUOTENAME(COLUMN_NAME))
                FROM    INFORMATION_SCHEMA.COLUMNS
                WHERE       TABLE_SCHEMA    = PARSENAME(@TableName, 2)
                    AND TABLE_NAME  = PARSENAME(@TableName, 1)
                    AND DATA_TYPE IN ('char', 'varchar', 'nchar', 'nvarchar')
                    AND QUOTENAME(COLUMN_NAME) > @ColumnName
            )

            IF @ColumnName IS NOT NULL
            BEGIN
                INSERT INTO #Results
                EXEC
                (
                    'SELECT TOP 1''' + @TableName + '.' + @ColumnName + ''', LEFT(' + @ColumnName + ', 3630) 
                    FROM ' + @TableName + ' (NOLOCK) ' +
                    ' WHERE ' + @ColumnName + ' = UPPER(' + @ColumnName + ') COLLATE Latin1_General_CS_AS'
                )
            END
        END 
    END

    SELECT ColumnName, ColumnValue FROM #Results
END
GO
EXEC SP_SearchAllTablesForAFieldWithAllCapitals

FYI: I used the query from here as a starting point. How to search all text fields in a DB for some substring with T-SQL