I'm building a Web-based SQL Server administration application to show views, tables, and columns. I use the syscolumns and sysobjects system tables to retrieve the data. Can I use a view to access the Column Description extended property for a column that a user has added?
You can't access extended properties from the information_schema views because extended properties aren't part of the ANSI standard for databases and because the information_schema views show you ANSI-standard objects. However, in SQL Server 2000, you can use the code sample that Listing 2 shows to retrieve them. Note that SQL Server 2000 stores the information about extended properties in the sysproperties system table, but future releases might not store the properties in the same system table.