INF: Finding Names of Columns That Comprise the Key of a Table

ID Number: Q48711

1.10 1.11 4.20

OS/2

Summary:

When writing general purpose applications, it is often necessary to

find out the names of the columns that comprise the key of a table.

sp_help displays this information, but it is not readily usable inside

a program in this format. The information is stored in the keys

columns in SYSINDEXES in a highly encoded form. The following is a

built-in function for decoding this data into a usable form:

INDEX_COL( "sysobjects", 2, 1 )

This function will return a text string containing the name of the

first column that comprises the second index on sysobjects. It is

described in "Microsoft SQL Server Command Reference."

Additional reference words: Transact-SQL