The INFORMATION_SCHEMA views allow you to retrieve metadata about the objects within a database. These views can be found in the master database under Views / System Views and be called from any database in your SQL Server instance. The reason these were developed was so that they are standard across all database platforms. In SQL 2005 and SQL 2008 these Information Schema views comply with the ISO standard.
Following is a list of each of the views that exist.
· INFORMATION_SCHEMA.CHECK_CONSTRAINTS
· INFORMATION_SCHEMA.COLUMN_DOMAIN_USAGE
· INFORMATION_SCHEMA.COLUMN_PRIVILEGES
· INFORMATION_SCHEMA.COLUMNS
· INFORMATION_SCHEMA.CONSTRAINT_COLUMN_USAGE
· INFORMATION_SCHEMA.CONSTRAINT_TABLE_USAGE
· INFORMATION_SCHEMA.DOMAIN_CONSTRAINTS
· INFORMATION_SCHEMA.DOMAINS
· INFORMATION_SCHEMA.KEY_COLUMN_USAGE
· INFORMATION_SCHEMA.PARAMETERS
· INFORMATION_SCHEMA.REFERENTIAL_CONSTRAINTS
· INFORMATION_SCHEMA.ROUTINE_COLUMNS
· INFORMATION_SCHEMA.ROUTINES
· INFORMATION_SCHEMA.SCHEMATA
· INFORMATION_SCHEMA.TABLE_CONSTRAINTS
· INFORMATION_SCHEMA.TABLE_PRIVILEGES
· INFORMATION_SCHEMA.TABLES
· INFORMATION_SCHEMA.VIEW_COLUMN_USAGE
· INFORMATION_SCHEMA.VIEW_TABLE_USAGE
· INFORMATION_SCHEMA.VIEWS
These views can be used from any of your databases. So if you want to gather data about Tables from your database all you need to do is to issue the below query....
USE <yourdatabase>
GO
GO
SELECT * FROM INFORMATION_SCHEMA.TABLES
GO
