Visual Basic® .NET Database Programming

Meta-Learning

SQL Server provides a couple of stored procedures that can be helpful in discovering what you can learn about. Using these methods, you can explore some of the hidden corners of the database and the server.

sp_stored_procedures

The sp_stored_procedures stored procedure lists the stored procedures in the current database. Unless you create stored procedures in your databases, sp_stored_procedures will usually return no results for them. The master database, however, is full of system-defined stored procedures. On this book’s test server, sp_stored_procedures returned a list of 1,030 stored procedures in the master database, including all the stored procedures described in this chapter. In fact, sp_stored_procedures even lists itself. ...