If you have an existing table, but you don't remember what are the columns defined in the table, you can use the "sys.columns" system view to get a list of all columns of all tables in the current database.

In order to a list of columns of a single table, you need to join sys.columns and sys.tables as shown in the tutorial example below:

SELECT * FROM sys.columns c, sys.tables t

WHERE c.object_id = t.object_id

AND t.name = 'tip'

GO

object_id name column_id user_type_id max_length

2073058421 id 1 56 4

2073058421 subject 2 167 80

2073058421 description 3 167 256

2073058421 create_date 4 61 8

You can see the column names easily from the sys.columns view. But you can only see the column type IDs. This requires another join to get the column type names. You may try the "sp_columns" stored procedure to get a better list of columns shown in the next tutorial.