Documenting a database starts with a data dictionary: every table, every column, its data type, length, nullability, and default. SQL Server exposes this through the ANSI-standard INFORMATION_SCHEMA views, which produce a portable schema report that reads almost like English and runs unchanged on other ISO-compliant …

Which columns make up a table's primary key, and in what order are they declared? For a single table, the system stored procedure sp_pkeys answers in one line; for a database-wide inventory, the catalog views behind it give you full control. This post covers both, from the quick lookup to the complete metadata query. …

The sys catalog views are the supported, forward-compatible way to read SQL Server metadata, and three of them — sys.objects, sys.tables, and sys.indexes — answer most day-to-day questions about what lives in a database. This script joins them into one inventory of every user table, its schema, its row count, and each …

A logging table grew to forty million rows, the bulk of it was archived out, and now only the last week's data remains — but the next insert still gets identity value 40,000,001, leaving a vast gap below it. Or a botched data load left the seed sitting far above the real maximum, and future inserts skip millions of …

"Where is every datetime column?" — "Which tables still use text instead of varchar(max)?" — "Are any columns using a deprecated user-defined type?" These are recurring DBA questions during schema audits, deprecation sweeps, and pre-migration assessments. This T-SQL script joins sys.columns to sys.types, sys.tables, …

Every database with foreign keys eventually needs a single inventory: every constraint, its parent table and column, and the referenced table and column on the other side. This T-SQL script joins sys.foreign_keys to sys.foreign_key_columns, sys.tables, and sys.columns to produce the canonical foreign-key map of the …

Before sys.dm_db_index_physical_stats existed, checking fragmentation across a database meant looking up every user table's object ID and running DBCC SHOWCONTIG against each one individually. This script closes that gap for the sysobjects-based era of SQL Server administration: it queries sysobjects for every table of …