SQL Server system tables contain meta data, data about your data. Accessing this data can be important, but Microsoft strongly discourages accessing the system tables directly. So how can you get this information? My article "Accessing System Tables" (March 2000) discussed a group of system functions that can return meta data information and showed some stored procedures that can help. SQL Server 7.0 features two new methods of obtaining system meta data: property functions and ANSI schema views.