In the fast paced and ever changing environments of business, often times changes need to be made to your business systems that reflect the changes in business processes required to support evolving markets.  Specifically, when designing and configuring the deployment of Dynamics CRM, there will inevitably be times when certain entity elements become obsolete and need to be decommissioned.  This is fairly easy to do in Dynamics CRM, however, over time the CRM user community will most likely have created personal views that are calling the decommissioned field or fields.  When decommissioning a field, Dynamics CRM does not cascade the change to personal objects in the application which will raise errors when those objects are called (when a view is selected).

In order to clean up the personal views and prevent annoying errors from popping up, you need to hunt down all the views that are using the decommissioned field or fields.  Dynamics CRM does not have systemic way to identify where all the views are in the application.  The following SQL can be used to identify all the views that are calling the decommissioned field, the owner of the view and other data points central to cleaning up the views and preventing annoying error messages.

Note:  The SQL is designed to run against an on-premise deployment of Dynamics CRM, but can also be modify to use fetch-XML in order to run against an online deployment of Dynamics CRM

Keeping your CRM application running smoothly and error free goes a long way in user adoption and can promote a CRM user community that is excited and open to new and improved ways of utilizing the power of Dynamics CRM in the organization.