Depends on what you need. You could use the INFORMATION_SCHEMA to get some metadata. For instance, if your database schema is db and you want the column names for table1:
columnNames = fetch(conn,['SELECT COLUMN_NAME FROM db.INFORMATION_SCHEMA.COLUMNS ' ...
' WHERE TABLE_NAME=''table1''']);
If you already make extensive use of the dmd, tables, and columns function you could write your own wrapper functions using the INFORMATION_SCHEMA and a native ODBC database connection.
