INF: Finding Names of Columns that Comprise the Key of a Table (48711)

This article was previously published under Q48711

When writing general purpose applications, it is often necessary to find out the names of the columns that comprise the key of a table. sp_help displays this information, but it is not readily usable inside a program in this format. The information is stored in the keys columns in SYSINDEXES in a highly encoded form. The following is a built-in function for decoding this data into a usable form:

   INDEX_COL( "sysobjects", 2, 1 )
		

This function will return a text string containing the name of the first column that comprises the second index on sysobjects. It is described in "Microsoft SQL Server Command Reference."