In Management Studio, you can right click on the tables group to create a filter for the table list. Has anyone figured out a way to include multiple tables in the filter? For example, I'd like all tables with "br_*" and "tbl_*" to show up.
Anyone know how to do this?
No, you can't do this. When we first got Management Studio I've tried every possible combination of everything you could think of: _, %, *, ", ', &&, &, and, or, |, ||, etc...
You might be able to roll your own addon to SMSS that would allow you to do what you are looking for:
The Black Art of Writing a SQL Server Management Studio 2005 Add-In
Extend Functionality in SQL Server 2005 Management Studio with Add-ins
The first one is specifically for searching and displaying all schema objects with a given name so you might be able to expand upon that for what you are looking for.
At first it looks like it could use a CONTAINS query (e.g. "br_*" OR "tbl_*"), but it doesn't seem to. It seems to only support a value that is then passed into a LIKE clause (e.g. 'app' becomes '%app%').
The "sql injection" method still works (v17.5), but with a twist:
zzzz' or charindex('pattern1', name) > 0 or charindex('pattern2', name) > 0 or name like 'zzzz
(I used the 'zzzz' to bypass the '%')
It doesn´t work if '_' or '%' is used in the patterns (or anywhere on your code), because it will automatically be replaced by '[_]' or '[%]' before evaluation.
The SQL injection method still works (somewhat) as of SSMS 2017 v17.8.1, although it puts brackets around the % symbol, so it will interpret those literally.
If you're using the Name->Contains filter, Profiler shows:
... AND dtb.name LIKE N'%MyDatabase1%')
So, in the Name->Contains field: MyDatabase1') OR (dtb.name LIKE 'MyDatabase2 should do it for simple cases.