Generating the column list for an SQL-Server Table

How often did you use in query analyzer extra | options | results | userdefined delimiter| ,
to the column list of a table in a form ready to replace the '*' in

Select * from mytable

by the complete column list?

Well I definitely did it too often. It is so easy to write a stored procedure for the same purpose:

if object_id('build_columnlist') > 0
    drop procedure build_columnlist
go

create procedure dbo.build_columnlist @table_name sysname
as
begin
declare @cols varchar(max)  -- varchar(8000) for sql server 2000

select @cols = case when @cols  is null then c.name else @cols + ', ' + c.name end
from syscolumns c join sysobjects o on c.id = o.id
where o.name = @table_name order by colorder

select @cols
end

go

now just type

exec build_columnlist 'mytable'

and when you display the result as text, it is there ready to copy and past.

Oops did you change extra | options | max characters pro column to 8000 ?
That was for Query Analyzer, SQL-Managemantstudio has a similar setting. 

And note the trick of updating a variable using a select statement.

defaults are always wrong.

Bernd