One of the things I hate the most about “old” databases is the fact that unused tables are kept forever, because nobody knows whether they’re used or not. Sometimes it’s really hard to tell. Some databases are accessed by a huge number of applications, reports, ETL tools and God knows what else. In these cases, deciding whether you should drop a table or not is a tough call.
Search your codebase
The easiest way to know if a table is used, is to search the codebase for occurences of the table name. However, finding the table name in the code does not mean it is used: there are code branches that in turn are not used. Modern languages and development tools can help you identify unused methods and objects, but it’s not always feasible or 100% reliable (binary dependencies, scripts, dynamic code are, off top of my head, some exceptions).
On the…
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Alessandro Alpi's Blog 