Show Table Structure

If you want to see the schema information of your table, you can use one of the following:

SHOW CREATE TABLE child; -- Option 1

CREATE TABLE `child` (
  `id` int(11) NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
  `fullName` varchar(100) NOT NULL,
  `myParent` int(11) NOT NULL,
  PRIMARY KEY (`id`),
  KEY `mommy_daddy` (`myParent`),
  CONSTRAINT `mommy_daddy` FOREIGN KEY (`myParent`) REFERENCES `parent` (`id`) 
      ON DELETE CASCADE ON UPDATE CASCADE
) ENGINE=InnoDB DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8;

If used from the mysql commandline tool, this is less verbose:

SHOW CREATE TABLE child \G

A less descriptive way of showing the table structure:

mysql> CREATE TABLE Tab1(id int, name varchar(30));
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.03 sec)

mysql> DESCRIBE Tab1; -- Option 2 

+-------+-------------+------+-----+---------+-------+ 
| Field | Type        | Null | Key | Default | Extra |  
+-------+-------------+------+-----+---------+-------+ 
| id    | int(11)     | YES  |     | NULL    |       | 
| name  | varchar(30) | YES  |     | NULL    |       |  
+-------+-------------+------+-----+---------+-------+

Both DESCRIBE and DESC gives the same result.

To see DESCRIBE performed on all tables in a database at once, see this Example.

Found a mistake? Have a question or improvement idea? Let me know.

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