@PaulWhite said: Absoutely - and I was going to include a quote from BOL to make the point that system views are preferred over INFORMATION_SCHEMA...but I didn't want to pile on too much. I agree that it is rarely better to use anything other than the system views like sys.columns in this case.
Thanks for all the good information you post, but I have to chime in on this one. Personally, I use system views almost exclusively, but there is a good reason to use INFORMATION_SCHEMA views and that is for portability of code. They are the SQL-92 standard. And when have you ever been afraid to pile on too much? 😛