The sysindexes system table contains information about your index structures that you can't get through information schema views. Every database has a sysindexes table, which contains one row for every index and one row for every column-based statistics on a table. In general, Microsoft recommends that you don't retrieve data directly from this table, but there's no other way to obtain some of the information it contains. You can derive some of the index properties from the INDEXPROPERTY() function, but not all of them, as I mentioned in my December column, "Digging Up the Dirt on Indexes," InstantDoc ID 44002.

One...