Having become a little too reliant (at times) on great GUI tools for interacting with my databases, I had to remind myself it’s pretty easy to use code to do this, sure good old Aqua Studio does it with CTRL+D on a data object in the editor, or both Oracle SQL Developer and the MS SQL Server Management Studio allow us to easily drill down the item in the data object tree, but still. Here it is in code…

Tables and views

For Oracle

desc TableName

For SQL Server

exec sp_columns TableName

Stored Procs

For Oracle

desc StoredProceName

For SQL Server

exec sp_help StoredProceName

In fact sp_help can be used for Stored Procs and Tables/Views.