Use meta with judiciousness

The common usage of meta in KDB is to provide the metadata of a table; however do not use it against a partioned table!

To empirically verify this for yourself, do this:

\ts meta partionedtable

The best way to retrieve the columns of a partioned table is to do something like this depending on how you are partioning:

columns:{[d]key exec from partionedtable where date=d, i=0}