There are two ways to obtain information about what is available on the server. This information, called schema information or metadata, includes information about what tables and stored procedures are available on the server and information about these tables and stored procedures (such as the fields a table contains, the indexes that are defined, and the parameters a stored procedure uses). 

The simplest way to obtain this metadata is to use the methods of TSQLConnection. These methods fill an existing string list or list object with the names of tables, stored procedures, fields, or indexes, or with parameter descriptors. This technique is the same as the way you fill lists with metadata for any other database connection component. These methods are described in Obtaining metadata. 

If you require more detailed schema information, you can populate a unidirectional dataset with metadata. Instead of a simple list, the unidirectional dataset is filled with schema information, where each record represents a single table, stored procedure, index, field, or parameter. See Fetching metadata into a unidirectional dataset for details on populating a unidirectional dataset with schema information.