Last week I was working for a client, designing a SQL Server 2005 database. I prefer to do my design, building the actual tables in SQL Management Studio. I know some purest frown on this as not truly a design phase, but rather implementing as you go. However, in my opinion, it is just as much effort to build a data model in a modeling tool (or Visio) as it is to build the real thing. By doing it right in SQL Server, I can always get a diagram out later and don't lose any cycles I would otherwise lose by first designing and then later implementing the same thing.
So anyway, I've got my data model, now I need to write a nice design document for my client. I started by writing a SQL query to extract the basic column data from the database. In a few minutes I put this together.
select t.name, c.name, typ.name, c.length
from syscolumns c, sysobjects t, systypes typ ...