What is the SQL command to return the field names of a table?

Question

Say I have a table called myTable. What is the SQL command to return all of the field names of this table? If the answer is database specific then I need SQL Server right now but would be interested in seeing the solution for other database systems as well.

Accepted Answer

MySQL 3 and 4 (and 5):

```
desc tablename
```

which is an alias for

```
show fields from tablename
```

SQL Server (from 2000) and MySQL 5:

```
select COLUMN_NAME from INFORMATION_SCHEMA.COLUMNS 
where TABLE_NAME = 'tablename'
```

Completing the answer: like people below have said, in SQL Server you can also use the stored procedure `sp_help`

```
exec sp_help 'tablename'
```

What is the SQL command to return the field names of a table?

Solution

Problem