Question

I’m learning SQL Server Compact for a program I’m writing that requries a local database. I have multiple tables, each with different columns and I’d like to mark each column as being a certain type (not a data type, just an integer tag) to let the program know what to do with it. I’m clueless about SQL. How does one do this?

Answer 1

I would use extended properties to store that meta data. For example:

EXEC sp_addextendedproperty N'columntag', N'123', 'SCHEMA', N'dbo', 'TABLE', N'mytable', 'COLUMN', N'id'

SELECT value AS columntag
FROM fn_listextendedproperty('columntag', 'SCHEMA', 'dbo', 'TABLE', 'mytable', 'column', 'id')

Replace ‘columntag’ with whatever you want to refer to your “integer tag” as, ‘mytable’ with the name of your table, ‘id’ with the name of the column in question, and the ‘123’ is your integer value you are storing for lookup. The first statement adds the extended property, and the second is how you would/could retrieve it programatically.