How do I find what the columns in a table are called and what type of fields they are?

SHOW COLUMNS does that for you ... (it's one of those little things that everyone keeps forgetting )

Here's an example of it in use, via the mysql client:

Code:

$ mysql Welcome to the MySQL monitor.  Commands end with ; or \g. Your MySQL connection id is 18 to server version: 3.23.22-beta Type 'help' for help. mysql> use H201; Reading table information for completion of table and column names You can turn off this feature to get a quicker startup with -A Database changed mysql> show columns from users; +-----------+-------------+------+-----+---------+----------------+---------------------------------+ | Field     | Type        | Null | Key | Default | Extra          | Privileges                      | +-----------+-------------+------+-----+---------+----------------+---------------------------------+ | id        | int(11)     |      | PRI | NULL    | auto_increment | select,insert,update,references | | username  | varchar(16) |      |     |         |                | select,insert,update,references | | password  | varchar(13) | YES  |     | NULL    |                | select,insert,update,references | | full_name | text        | YES  |     | NULL    |                | select,insert,update,references | +-----------+-------------+------+-----+---------+----------------+---------------------------------+ 4 rows in set (0.05 sec) mysql> exit; Bye $

Later note - OUCH - that displays nasty.  Think I've a problem with cut and paste, tabs and spaces.  Try oit on your own MySQL tables, and you'll find it looks very neat!

does: "desc column_name" do the same thing?

jfp

Basically, yes.   I understand that "desc" and "describe" don't add any extra functionallity to what you can do with show.   They're just there to be provide something that Oracle users might be familiar with coding.

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