To view information about MySQL databases and their tables, we first connect to the MySQL console, for example, as root:
mysql -u root
Or so, if you need to enter a password:
mysql -u root -p
Let’s see a list of existing databases:
SHOW DATABASES;
You can select a database like this:
USE dbname;
See which database is currently selected:
SELECT DATABASE();
To see which tables the selected database contains:
SHOW TABLES;
Example of viewing the contents of the specified table:
SELECT * FROM tablename LIMIT 25;
To view the structure of a particular table, execute the command:
DESCRIBE tablename;
Where Field is the name of the column, Type is the data type, Null – determines whether the column can contain NULL values, Key – whether the column is indexed, Default – determines the default value for the column.
To see information about the indexes of the table, you can do this:
SHOW INDEX FROM tablename;
View information about the table, the encoding, its type (ENGINES), etc. you can use:
SHOW CREATE TABLE tablename;
To see what types the server supports, you can do this:
SHOW ENGINES;
