me talking out loud

While talking with Dynom and Davey I learned something really cool today - how to get the declared definition of a column all by itself with MySQL (I used version 5.0.45). Yes there are lots of other ways to get the info - not the least of which is using the information_schema - but this just struck me as being way cool.

You can even use wildcards in the column name. From a different database (note you have to have the perms to access the alternate database):


DESCRIBE Db.table column;


Example from my test db:

mysql> describe lig_test.student guardianship;
+--------------+---------+------+-----+---------+-------+
| Field        | Type    | Null | Key | Default | Extra |
+--------------+---------+------+-----+---------+-------+
| guardianship | char(1) | NO   |     |         |       |
+--------------+---------+------+-----+---------+-------+
1 row in set (0.08 sec)

mysql> describe lig_test.student 'guard%';
+----------------+----------+------+-----+---------+-------+
| Field          | Type     | Null | Key | Default | Extra |
+----------------+----------+------+-----+---------+-------+
| guardian_photo | longblob | YES  |     | NULL    |       |
| guardianship   | char(1)  | NO   |     |         |       |
+----------------+----------+------+-----+---------+-------+
2 rows in set (0.01 sec)

      

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 4th, 2008 at 4:49 pm and is filed under General, computers, MySQL. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.