Essential ADO.NET

3.4. Metadata Methods

The ANSI SQL standards (SQL-92 and SQL-99) define a series of metadata items that should be kept by a relational database. This list, known as the SQL information schema, contains data about database items such as tables, columns, primary keys, and stored procedure parameters. This information is presented in special metadata views. The spec describes the views that constitute the information schema and the metadata that should be available. An example (COLUMNs information) is shown in Table 3-3. Such information is especially useful for writing generic clients that present list boxes of information based on this metadata, such as a list of tables.

OLE DB provides a standard way to obtain metadata from the information schema. ...