A few days ago, I wrote how I will be your guide to the Grand Tour of the Information Schema and its Applications which is one of the two talks I will be doing at the upcoming MySQL User's Conference.

In view of the popularity of "Pop Quiz" format so successfully used by Carsten, I feel compelled to imitation, and as a primer to my talk, I'd like to offer you my "Me Too" MySQL Information Schema popquiz. So, here goes...


The MySQL information_schema contains a …

Last week I blogged about the upcoming MySQL Users conference, in particular about the Writing MySQL UDFs tutorial that I will be delivering.

I will also be doing the Grand Tour of the Information Schema and its Applications.


I will discuss the elements in the MySQL information schema, and provide tips to write queries against it. Most of the talk …

Back when I was doing a lot of work with Oracle, I learned to lean heavily on the SYSTEM views - Oracle’s equivalent to the INFORMATION_SCHEMA database. These views can really help you when it comes to writing dynamic SQL in stored procedures, or just taking quick shortcuts while you’re writing code. Or, if you’re [...]

I've known about the INFORMATION_SCHEMA views (or system tables) in SQL Server for a while, but I just leared recently that they are actually part of the SQL-92 standard and supported on other database platforms.

The INFORMATION_SCHEMA views provide meta data information about the tables, columns, and other parts of your database. Because the structure of these tables are standardized you can write SQL statements that work on various database platforms.

For example suppose you want to return a resultset with a list of all columns in a table called employees

SELECT table_name, column_name, is_nullable, data_type, character_maximum_length
FROM INFORMATION_SCHEMA.Columns
WHERE table_name = 'employees'

Quite a handy feature, but it's hard to find what versions the of various database platforms started supporting this feature, here's a quick list:

• Microsoft …