{DESCRIBE | DESC}tbl_name
[col_name
|wild
]
DESCRIBE
provides information about
the columns in a table. It is a shortcut for SHOW COLUMNS
FROM
. (See Section 12.4.5.5, “SHOW COLUMNS
Syntax”.)
col_name
can be a column name, or a
string containing the SQL “%
” and
“_
” wildcard characters to obtain
output only for the columns with names matching the string. There
is no need to enclose the string within quotes unless it contains
spaces or other special characters.
mysql> DESCRIBE City;
+------------+----------+------+-----+---------+----------------+
| Field | Type | Null | Key | Default | Extra |
+------------+----------+------+-----+---------+----------------+
| Id | int(11) | | PRI | NULL | auto_increment |
| Name | char(35) | | | | |
| Country | char(3) | | UNI | | |
| District | char(20) | YES | MUL | | |
| Population | int(11) | | | 0 | |
+------------+----------+------+-----+---------+----------------+
5 rows in set (0.00 sec)
The description for SHOW COLUMNS
provides more information about the output columns (see
Section 12.4.5.5, “SHOW COLUMNS
Syntax”).
If the data types differ from what you expect them to be based on
a CREATE TABLE
statement, note that
MySQL sometimes changes data types when you create or alter a
table. The conditions under which this occurs are described in
Section 12.1.5.1, “Silent Column Specification Changes”.
The DESCRIBE
statement is provided
for compatibility with Oracle.
The SHOW CREATE TABLE
,
SHOW TABLE STATUS
, and
SHOW INDEX
statements also provide
information about tables. See Section 12.4.5, “SHOW
Syntax”.
User Comments
A note on privileges:
The DESCRIBE command appears to be a shorthand for SELECT.
Thus, the privileges for DESCRIBE will be the privileges for SELECT.
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