Too many tables in Sybase, how too cope

Question

I have Sybase version 10.0.1.3960 and 'inherited' very large database. I am trying to grant SELECT privileges on all tables to a single user.

The problem is there are a lot of tables, 681 tables to be exact!

Too many tables to write the query manually, so I generated the sql progamatically. The trouble is that the programatically generated is too long. Sybase has a VARCHAR limit of 32767 (2^15-1) and the query is longer than that. I tried defining a LONG VARCHAR but I keep getting an error.

I'm at my rope's end, how can I make this work?

DECLARE @login   VARCHAR(255)
DECLARE @payload VARCHAR(32765) -- <-- too few characters, too many tables
SELECT @login = 'myUserLogin'
SELECT @payload = Result.Payload FROM (
  SELECT LIST(tbl.ApplicableAsset, ';\n') AS 'Payload'
  From (
     SELECT 'GRANT SELECT ON ' + name + ' TO ' + @login +'' AS 'ApplicableAsset'
     FROM sysobjects
     WHERE type='U'
  ) AS tbl
) AS Result
EXECUTE ( @payload )

Answer 1

You could create a cursor for this case. In cursot you could generate a executed string with control length of string. For example, if Length of string more than 2000 sym - you could execute this string and start to generate a new string.

For example, it could be as:

Decalre Cur Cursor for select One_Grant_Expression from .... 
go   
Open Cur   
Declare @SQLText varchar(8000)   
Declare @OneText varchar(1000)   
fetch Cur into @OneTExt   

while (@@sqlstatus = 0) do  
begin
     Set @SQLText = @SQLText + @OneText

if Length(@SQLText) > 2000

  begin 
       exec (@SQLText)
       Set @SQLText = ''
  end
  fetch Cur into @OneTExt   
end

 If Length(@SQLText) > 0  begin   exec (@SQLText) end

 Close Cur 
go