Personal Computing and Development by Dag J. Nedrelid

Column count in SQL

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SELECT COUNT(1) AS RowCount FROM table

Unless you know where to look:

SELECT COUNT(1) AS ColumnCount
FROM INFORMATION_SCHEMA.COLUMNS
WHERE TABLE_NAME='tablename';

This should work from SQL server 2000 and MySQL 5 and upwards.

Differences between MSSQL and MySQL.
In MySQL you can add the TABLE_SCHEMA to the WHERE clause in order to define what database contains the table you are looking for, to count columns. In MSSQL it seems to only contain “dbo” which doesn’t help much.

There are most likely other places to look for that information, I just haven’t had any need for it yet. And if your user only has access to 1 database, you shouldn’t need it anyway.