Best practice when getting the structure of the resulting query or table.

There are several instances when we require the structure of the query or the table. One of the most common practices to achieve this is to use "WHERE 1=0" along with the select part of the statement. It's really not practical when the query has several parameters or when you want to use a stored procedure. As a best practice, it is recommended to use SET FMTONLY ON and OFF. One big advantage of using this option is SqlServer will not generate, compile a query plan, because the actual statement is not being executed. When SQL Reporting Services and Visual Studio read stored procedures for the first time to retrieve column names, they use SET FMTONLY ON and OFF. When this option is set, only the metadata is read. Let's see this by example, in your Query Analyzer, make sure you switch on the "Include Actual Execution Plan" to see this in action and run the following queries:

USE Northwind

SET FMTONLY ON 
EXEC dbo.CustOrderHist 'ALFKI'
SET FMTONLY OFF 

SET FMTONLY ON 
SELECT * FROM dbo.Customers
SET FMTONLY OFF 

SELECT * FROM dbo.Customers where 1=0

Only the last statement has the execution plan included.