HowTo parsed Stored Procs to get a list of tables and columns referenced in WHERE, GROUP BY, AND JOIN clauses
sysdepends &amp; sys.sql_modules have some known limitations... and you probably don't want to perform string-parsing gymnastics if you want to rely on your results with a high level of confidence. Although neither of these options is really something I would recommend as an answer to your problem. 


  The goal is to use the result list to build some CREATE STATS commands based on the number of times a table.col pair is referenced.


Perhaps you've got a highly targeted need to do exactly this, but my first reaction is that you might want to take a more holistic approach to your stats maintenance than reviewing the text inside stored procedures. You may have an heavy ad-hoc query load that doesn't ever touch a stored procedure. You may have 10 stored procs that reference all the things but are never called and 1 stored proc that touches less but is called all the time. I recommend taking a step back and browsing some literature before taking the path you seem to be steering toward with this question.