You want to quickly find out what the recovery model is for your database but you don’t want to start clicking and right-clicking in SSMS/Enterprise Manager to get that information. This is what you can do, you can use databasepropertyex to get that info. Replace ‘msdb’ with your database name

select databasepropertyex('msdb','Recovery') 

What if you want it for all databases in one shot? No problem here is how, this will work on SQL Server version 2000

SELECT name,DATABASEPROPERTYEX(name,'Recovery') 
 from sysdatabases

For SQL Server 2005 and up, you should use the following command

select name,recovery_model_desc
from sys.databases

I have also added this to our SQL Server admin Wiki here: Find Out The Recovery Model For Your Database

Make sure to check out the other wiki entries

If you have a SQL related question try our Microsoft SQL Server Programming forum or our Microsoft SQL Server Admin forum