ADO.NET Cookbook

Chapter 10. Enumerating and Maintaining Database Objects

Introduction

This chapter describes techniques to get schema information and metadata from databases, manage database objects, and enumerate installed database providers and drivers.

There are many ways to get schema information and other information from a SQL Server database. Some of these techniques are:

• SQL Server Distributed Management Objects (SQL-DMO) is a collection of objects that encapsulate SQL Server database and replication management. You can use SQL-DMO to automate SQL Server tasks, create and administer SQL Server objects, and install and configure replication. You can use SQL-DMO from a .NET application through COM interop. Recipe 10.1 shows how to use SQL-DMO to get a list of SQL Servers on your network.

• SQL Server 2000 introduced information schema views that provide system-table independent access to SQL Server metadata. They provide an alternative to system stored procedures and conform to the SQL-92 Standard and are less tightly bound to the underlying database. Recipe 10.2 shows how to use information schema views to retrieve database schema information. Recipe 10.11 uses information schema views to create relationships in a DataSet at runtime based on the relationships defined in the SQL server.

• System stored procedures can be used to get database schema information. Recipe 10.3 shows how to use the sp_helpconstraint system stored procedure to get default values for columns. Recipe 10.4 shows how to use ...