The COLUMNS table provides
      information about columns in tables.
    
| INFORMATION_SCHEMAName | SHOWName | Remarks | 
| TABLE_CATALOG | NULL | |
| TABLE_SCHEMA | ||
| TABLE_NAME | ||
| COLUMN_NAME | Field | |
| ORDINAL_POSITION | see notes | |
| COLUMN_DEFAULT | Default | |
| IS_NULLABLE | Null | |
| DATA_TYPE | Type | |
| CHARACTER_MAXIMUM_LENGTH | Type | |
| CHARACTER_OCTET_LENGTH | ||
| NUMERIC_PRECISION | Type | |
| NUMERIC_SCALE | Type | |
| CHARACTER_SET_NAME | ||
| COLLATION_NAME | Collation | |
| COLUMN_TYPE | Type | MySQL extension | 
| COLUMN_KEY | Key | MySQL extension | 
| EXTRA | Extra | MySQL extension | 
| PRIVILEGES | Privileges | MySQL extension | 
| COLUMN_COMMENT | Comment | MySQL extension | 
Notes:
          In SHOW, the
          Type display includes values from several
          different COLUMNS columns.
        
          ORDINAL_POSITION is necessary because you
          might want to say ORDER BY
          ORDINAL_POSITION. Unlike
          SHOW,
          SELECT does not have automatic
          ordering.
        
          CHARACTER_OCTET_LENGTH should be the same
          as CHARACTER_MAXIMUM_LENGTH, except for
          multi-byte character sets.
        
          CHARACTER_SET_NAME can be derived from
          Collation. For example, if you say
          SHOW FULL COLUMNS FROM t, and you see in
          the Collation column a value of
          latin1_swedish_ci, the character set is
          what is before the first underscore:
          latin1.
        
The following statements are nearly equivalent:
SELECT COLUMN_NAME, DATA_TYPE, IS_NULLABLE, COLUMN_DEFAULT FROM INFORMATION_SCHEMA.COLUMNS WHERE table_name = 'tbl_name' [AND table_schema = 'db_name'] [AND column_name LIKE 'wild'] SHOW COLUMNS FROMtbl_name[FROMdb_name] [LIKE 'wild']


User Comments
This is the equivalent syntax for "all_tab_columns" that is used for Oracle
-Gelomon
Add your own comment.