Identifying tables with specific contents in Oracle SQL Developer

Question

I am trying to find data in a database with hundreds of tables. I am currently "select staring" each table to view their contents, and it is taking forever! Is there a way that I can write a query to filter all of the tables with specific contents? For example, suppose I wanted to find all of the tables that contained "Montana" in any of the columns. Is that possible?

Answer 1

If you loop through all "character"-like columns, you'd do it like this (it also calculates how many times the search string is found in that table/column). I don't have any Virginia, so I'm searching for KING instead.

SQL> set serveroutput on
SQL> declare
  2    l_cnt number;
  3  begin
  4    for cur_r in (select table_name, column_name
  5                  from user_tab_columns
  6                  where data_type like '%CHAR%'
  7                 )
  8    loop
  9      execute immediate 'select count(*) from ' || cur_r.table_name ||
 10                        '  where ' || cur_r.column_name ||' = ' ||
 11                        chr(39) || 'KING' || chr(39)
 12                   into l_cnt;
 13      if l_cnt > 0 then
 14         dbms_output.put_line(cur_r.table_name ||'.'|| cur_r.column_name ||': '|| l_cnt);
 15      end if;
 16    end loop;
 17  end;
 18  /
EMP.ENAME: 1
V_EMP.ENAME: 1

PL/SQL procedure successfully completed.

SQL>