Dynamically determining table name given field name in SQL server - sql

Question

Strange situation: I am trying to remove some hard coding from my code. There is a situation where I have a field, lets say "CityID", and using this information, I want to find out which table contains a primary key called CityID.
Logically, you'd say that it's probably a table called "City" but it's not... that table is called "Cities". There are some other inconsistencies in database naming hence I can never be sure if removing the string "ID" and finding out the plural will be sufficient.
Note: Once I figure out that CityID refers to a table called Cities, I will perform a join to replace CityID with city name on the fly. I will appreciate if someonw can also tell me how to find out the first varchar field in a table given its name.

Answer 1

SELECT name FROM sysobjects
WHERE id IN ( SELECT id FROM syscolumns WHERE name = 'THE_COLUMN_NAME' )
To get column information from the specified table:
SELECT column_name, data_type, character_maximum_length
FROM information_schema.columns
WHERE table_name = 'myTable'

Answer 2

select table_name from information_schema.columns where column_name='CityID'

Answer 3

You can use the INFORMATION_SCHEMA tables to read metadata about the database.
SELECT
TABLE_NAME
FROM
[db].[INFORMATION_SCHEMA].[COLUMNS]
WHERE
COLUMN_NAME='CityID';
For a primer in what's in the INFORMAITON_SCHEMA, see INFORMATION_SCHEMA, a map to your database

Answer 4

The information you seek is all available in the information schema views. Note that you will find many sources telling you how to directly query the underlying system tables that these are views onto - and I must admit that I do the same when it's just to find something out quickly - but the recommended way for applications is to go through these views.
For example, to find your CityID column:
SELECT * FROM INFORMATION_SCHEMA.COLUMNS WHERE COLUMN_NAME = 'CityID'
To find the first varchar field in a table:
SELECT TOP 1 * FROM INFORMATION_SCHEMA.COLUMNS WHERE
TABLE_NAME = 'TableName'
AND DATA_TYPE = 'varchar' -- This is off the top of my head!
ORDER BY ORDINAL_POSITION

Answer 5

As I understand from your question, you want to find tables which contain CITYID column in primary key
You can use SQL Server system views like sysindexes and sysindexkeys as shown in SQL tutorial to query database table primary keys including composite primary keys which are formed
SELECT
TBL.name as TableName
FROM sysobjects as PK
INNER JOIN sys.objects as TBL
on TBL.object_id = PK.parent_obj
INNER JOIN sysindexes as IND
on IND.name = PK.name AND
IND.id = TBL.object_id
INNER JOIN SysIndexKeys as KEYS
on KEYS.id = IND.id AND
KEYS.indid = IND.indid
INNER JOIN syscolumns as COL
on COL.id = KEYS.id AND
COL.colid = KEYS.colid
WHERE
PK.xtype = 'PK' AND
COL.name = 'CityID'