On all examples I see on the Internet, when comes time to get the schema of a table, there is always an example like this:

'Retrieve records from the Employees table into a DataReader.
cmd.Connection = cn
cmd.CommandText = "SELECT * FROM Employees"
myReader = cmd.ExecuteReader(CommandBehavior.KeyInfo)

I am always asking myself, what is the need to retrieve all records of the table just to get the schema. In my case, I always use a SQL such as:

Select * From Employees WHERE 1=2

Or, is it that the ExecuteReader() command is not retrieving the records but only uses its syntax to get the schema?