How to get column names from a table in SQL Server?

Question

Table Languages:

How to select the Column Names of this table?

The result would be:

"Ididiome", "Acronym", and "Language".

Answer 1

Select INFORMATION_SCHEMA.COLUMNS asking for the column COLUMN_NAME. In INFORMATION_SCHEMA.COLUMNS you have information about all columns for all tables of a database schema.

Query:

SELECT COLUMN_NAME 
FROM INFORMATION_SCHEMA.COLUMNS
WHERE TABLE_NAME = 'NomedaTabela'

Sqlfiddle

Answer 2

Another way to get the column names of some table is query sys.Columns using the function object_id() that takes the table/view name and returns its internal id.

This works from SQL Server 2008

SELECT * FROM sys.columns WHERE object_id = object_id('nome_tabela')

Reference: How do you Return the column Names from a table?