The main purpose of SchemaProber is to provide a lightweight representation of a database schema. It doesn't do anything except relay information from the database. Here's the class diagram for SchemaProber:

HyperActive uses the SchemaProber simply for enumerating the database objects it needs to model as ActiveRecord classes.

The main pluggable component in the SchemaProber is the IDbProvider interface which looks like this:

The intention being that one could create a provider for any database. Currently, I only have the Sql Server implementation, SqlServerProvider, and I'm in the process of writing a Firebird implementation.

Here is a fairly stupid example of using the SchemaProber. All it does is display some simple info about a database schema. And yes, the functionality can be created a million different ways, the intention of the SchemaProber however was to be lightweight(no external dependencies beyond the .NET framework) and interchangable with many data providers.