I've heard rumors that the INFORMATION_SCHEMA views are deprecated in later versions, but the information even on MSDN isn't very clear on that. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms186778.aspx. It seems the INFORMATION_SCHEMA views are still the ANSI-compliant method for querying metadata (if that matters). The link posted does say that some of the views have changed seemingly to be MORE ANSI-compliant than before. From the description at that link it seems mostly the changes involve mandating strict naming conventions. I hope these views don't go away entirely since they have proven very useful to me!