ApexSQL Clean Identifies Unused and Unreferenced Objects in Databases

In the next step, you can select one or more external databases if the object is referencing tables in other databases. This feature is extremely useful when we have used external databases for archiving or auditing purposes. It also helps to identify parent and child references in the internal and external databases.

In Clean Options you can choose to ignore the lines for a given comment delimiter or set of tags; for example, you may choose to ignore single and multi-line comments you have used in your C#, VB, or ASP.NET code.

You can also select search settings. If you have a collation set to case sensitive, using the first option, you may want to exclude triggers from a search because they always reference the parent table. If you want them to come up in the results, however, just keep the second option unchecked. The third option is very generic: Match Whole Word Only.

When you Choose Object Types, you may also define their filters. If you have previously saved a filter or selection profile, you can import it. You can export newly created ones into an XML format for future reference. The ability to customize your search settings for larger databases is really useful and handy.

As you can see in the screenshot above, ApexSQL Clean supports SQL Server 2005. It doesn't support Certificates or Asymmetric and Symmetric Key objects—this will be included in a future release.