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I have often gone into situations where companies have an undocumented DB scehma. In many cases I have to start with something as basic as their item / customer master. From there I can usually get a good list of field names to begin my search for data to cube. Once I have that I need to know which table to join to, that is which of the tables in the DB have fields that match those I have identified as useful. This is a useful query to find the specified column in all tables in a particular database.

SELECT
 name AS TableName
,CASE WHEN xtype = 'U' THEN 'Table' ELSE 'View' END AS Type
FROM sysobjects
WHERE id IN ( SELECT id FROM syscolumns WHERE name = 'columnname')
AND xtype = 'U'
ORDER BY name