Meta Data services?

Hi

I'm very new to SQL Server 2000. I'm a student applied informatics and for my personal training I work in a software company.

My job exists of learning & using MS SQL Server 2000. I worked a lot and SQL Server 2000 works well.

The only thing I really don't understand is META DATA SERVICES !

So, my question to ...

What is the purpose of Meta data
How can I manage meta data in SQL Server 2000
Where can I find some good resources for learning to work with meta data in SQL Server 2000.

Thanks !!!

JHi

Is this topic so difficult?

I always heard that meta data was an important step in devellopement?

Is this true or not?|||Meta Data are the data of the data... What does it mean? Well, you need to store information to define a column in a table, like varchar(50) NULL. This information are called Meta Data.

The use of it? The other day I built a fast web form that had to validate the size of the string the user was entering. Depending of the option selected, I had to insert the string in a varchar(15), (18), (50) or (65) column. I wrote a stored proc that was returning the size of the field I had to write in, which I put in my MAXLENGTH web tag, using javascript.

So my stored proc reads the meta data of the field I ask for...

Fun isn't it?