check-column-is-accessible.md

Check if a column is accessible

Explore this snippet here.

Description

One method to check if the current session has access to a column is to use the COL_LENGTH function, which returns the length of a column in bytes. If the column doesn't exist (or cannot be accessed), COL_LENGTH returns null.

select
  col_length('Orders', 'Sales') as does_exist,
  col_length('Orders', 'Shmales') as does_not_exist

does_exist	does_not_exist
8	NULL