How can I get column names from a table in SQL Server?

Question

You can obtain this information and much, much more by querying the Information Schema views.

This sample query:

SELECT *
FROM INFORMATION_SCHEMA.COLUMNS
WHERE TABLE_NAME = N'Customers'

Can be made over all these DB objects:

• CHECK_CONSTRAINTS
• COLUMN_DOMAIN_USAGE
• COLUMN_PRIVILEGES
• COLUMNS
• CONSTRAINT_COLUMN_USAGE
• CONSTRAINT_TABLE_USAGE
• DOMAIN_CONSTRAINTS
• DOMAINS
• KEY_COLUMN_USAGE
• PARAMETERS
• REFERENTIAL_CONSTRAINTS
• ROUTINES
• ROUTINE_COLUMNS
• SCHEMATA
• TABLE_CONSTRAINTS
• TABLE_PRIVILEGES
• TABLES
• VIEW_COLUMN_USAGE
• VIEW_TABLE_USAGE
• VIEWS

You can use the stored procedure sp_columns which would return information pertaining to all columns for a given table. More info can be found here http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms176077.aspx

You can also do it by a SQL query. Some thing like this should help:

SELECT * FROM sys.columns WHERE object_id = OBJECT_ID('dbo.yourTableName') 

Or a variation would be:

SELECT   o.Name, c.Name
FROM     sys.columns c 
         JOIN sys.objects o ON o.object_id = c.object_id 
WHERE    o.type = 'U' 
ORDER BY o.Name, c.Name

This gets all columns from all tables, ordered by table name and then on column name.

select *
from INFORMATION_SCHEMA.COLUMNS
where TABLE_NAME='tableName'

This is better than getting from sys.columns because it shows DATA_TYPE directly.

You can use sp_help in SQL Server 2008.

sp_help <table_name>;

Keyboard shortcut for the above command: select table name (i.e highlight it) and press ALT+F1.

By using this query you get the answer:

select Column_name 
from Information_schema.columns 
where Table_name like 'table name'

You can write this query to get column name and all details without using INFORMATION_SCHEMA in MySql :

SHOW COLUMNS FROM database_Name.table_name;

SELECT name
FROM sys.columns
WHERE object_id = OBJECT_ID('TABLE_NAME')

TABLE_NAME is your table