Microsoft® SQL Server® 2008 Internals
by Paul Randal Kalen Delaney Kimberly Tripp, and Conor Cunningham
Primitive System Catalog Consistency Checks
The storage engine in SQL Server 2008 defines three of the system catalogs as being critical to its operations. These tables are
sys.sysallocunits
sys.sysrowsets
sys.sysrscols
In SQL Server 2005, there were two more critical system tables—sys.syshobts and sys.syshobtcolumns—but these have been folded into the sys.sysrowsets and sys.sysrscols tables, respectively. Collectively, these are the equivalent of the old sysindexes, sysobjects, and syscolumns tables. They hold all the base metadata that the storage engine needs to navigate around the table and index structures. DBCC CHECKDB also uses them for this purpose, although indirectly through the metadata subsystem in the Relational Engine.
These system catalogs ...
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