When you are writing a SELECT statement and you just want to limit the number of columns, you would use the sp_help stored procedure to research the underlying table structure as shown below.
The sp_help system stored procedure will return all the data about a particular table when you pass the table name into the stored procedure.
But If you don't want to sort through all that information, it is possible to get only the names of the columns by executing a query that selects all columns with a false WHERE clause as shown below.
SELECT *
FROM [HumanResources].[Employee]
WHERE 1=0
This query tells SQL Server to return all the columns and rows where one equals zero. Because one can never equal zero, SQL Server will return the column names from the table with no data.
