7. Getting and Analyzing Metadata
Sometimes just data is not enough. You need data about data. You might even need data about how you are getting the data. In some cases it might even be convenient to get the metadata using SQL, and indeed, you can for several vendors. You can then incorporate the results into your other scripts such as conditionally creating a table only if it is not already created and so forth.
Another type of metadata is how well a query performs. Though in principle SQL is supposed to abstract us away from the mechanics of locating and retrieving data, it is an abstraction nonetheless. And as Joel Spolsky1 has written, all abstractions are leaky. So it is possible to write a query that forces a suboptimal execution plan, ...
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