Yep. It’s time for your monthly homework session. You’ve finished last months right? Please turn it in over there.

This month, I want you to think about data. Specifically the fact that no matter what type of database person you are data is your life. The people we work for want the data they stored in their tables. We want the data about those tables. The meta-data. And geeze there is a lot of it. Most of it is exposed to us in system views like the DMVs and DMFs. For some of it you are going to have to look elsewhere. This month I want you to take a look at the PROPERTIES functions.

• ASSEMBLYPROPERTY
• ASYMKEYPROPERTY
• CERTPROPERTY
• COLLATIONPROPERTY
• COLUMNPROPERTY
• CONNECTIONPROPERTY
• DATABASEPROPERTYEX
• FILEGROUPPROPERTY
• FILEPROPERTY
• FULLTEXTCATALOGPROPERTY
• FULLTEXTSERVICEPROPERTY
• INDEXKEY_PROPERTY
• INDEXPROPERTY
• LOGINPROPERTY
• OBJECTPROPERTY
• OBJECTPROPERTYEX
• SERVERPROPERTY
• SESSIONPROPERTY
• SQL_VARIANT_PROPERTY
• SYMKEYPROPERTY
• TYPEPROPERTY

 
Ok, that’s a lot of property functions (if you know any I missed mention them in the comments and I’ll add them). A lot more than I expected when I started making the list. Also, to be honest, some of them aren’t all that useful except in niche cases and others are deprecated. That said, there is a lot of useful information in there. Take a look at 5. I don’t really care which 5 (although I recommend OBJECTPROPERTY) but take a good look at them. See what properties they expose. Some of those properties may be exposed in a system view or a different function. That’s fine. I’ll promise you right now that a bunch of them aren’t. As with a lot of these homework posts the goal is to familiarize yourself with what’s out there in case you need it in the future.

Have fun exploring!