I am trying to get the column names from 2 tables.
I tried a query like: (SHOW COLUMNS FROM users) UNION (SHOW COLUMNS FROM posts)
but that does not work & returns a syntax error. I tried the same query using DESCRIBE
but that did not work either. How can I get all the column names from multiple tables in a single query? Is it possible?
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Answer
From the docs for version 5.0 (http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/show-columns.html)
"SHOW COLUMNS displays information about the columns in a given table"
So you can’t really use it on multiple tables. However if you have information_schema
database then you could use it like follows:
select column_name from `information_schema`.`columns` where `table_schema` = 'mydb' and `table_name` in ('users', 'posts');
Here you’d have to replace the mydb
with your database name, or just use DATABASE()
.