Find broken objects in SQL Server

You may be interested in checking out the following articles:

• Michael J. Swart: Find Missing SQL Dependencies
• eggheadcafe.com: Find broken stuff

You can test Michael J. Swart's solution as follows:

CREATE PROCEDURE proc_bad AS
    SELECT col FROM nonexisting_table
GO

SELECT
    OBJECT_NAME(referencing_id) AS [this sproc or VIEW...],
    referenced_entity_name AS [... depends ON this missing entity name]
FROM 
    sys.sql_expression_dependencies
WHERE 
    is_ambiguous = 0
    AND OBJECT_ID(referenced_entity_name) IS NULL
ORDER BY 
    OBJECT_NAME(referencing_id), referenced_entity_name;

Which returns:

+------------------------+------------------------------------------+
| this sproc or VIEW...  |  ... depends ON this missing entity name |
|------------------------+------------------------------------------|
| proc_bad               |  nonexisting_table                       |
+------------------------+------------------------------------------+

The two previous solutions here are interesting, but both failed on my test databases.

The original Michael J Swart script produced a huge number of false positives for me, far too many to wade through. Rick V.'s solution here was better - the only false positives it gave were for cross-database references.

There's a comment on the Michael J Swart article by RaduSun which gives a solution that I can't yet break though! This is it, tweaked mildly for readability and my purposes, but credit to RaduSun for the logic.

SELECT 
    QuoteName(OBJECT_SCHEMA_NAME(referencing_id)) + '.' 
        + QuoteName(OBJECT_NAME(referencing_id)) AS ProblemObject,
    o.type_desc,
    ISNULL(QuoteName(referenced_server_name) + '.', '')
    + ISNULL(QuoteName(referenced_database_name) + '.', '')
    + ISNULL(QuoteName(referenced_schema_name) + '.', '')
    + QuoteName(referenced_entity_name) AS MissingReferencedObject
FROM
    sys.sql_expression_dependencies sed
        LEFT JOIN sys.objects o
            ON sed.referencing_id=o.object_id
WHERE
    (is_ambiguous = 0)
    AND (OBJECT_ID(ISNULL(QuoteName(referenced_server_name) + '.', '')
    + ISNULL(QuoteName(referenced_database_name) + '.', '')
    + ISNULL(QuoteName(referenced_schema_name) + '.', '')
    + QuoteName(referenced_entity_name)) IS NULL)
ORDER BY
    ProblemObject,
    MissingReferencedObject