Show Me
Let’s take a moment to admire our work and see what we’ve done so
far. To get a list of databases, use the SHOW DATABASES
statement:
SHOW DATABASES; +-----------+ | Database | +-----------+ | bookstore | | mysql | | test | +-----------+
The result of the SHOW
DATABASES
statement lists not only the database we’ve
created, but also two others. One is the mysql
database, which contains data about user privileges and was covered in
Chapter 2. The third database is the
test
database, which is set up by default when MySQL is
installed. It’s there as a convenience for you to be able to add tables or
run SQL statements for testing.
To see a list of tables in the bookstore
database, once we
select the bookstore
database with the
USE
statement shown earlier, we would enter the
following statement:
SHOW TABLES; +---------------------+ | Tables_in_bookstore | +---------------------+ | authors | | books | +---------------------+
The result of the SHOW
TABLES
statement provides a list containing our two tables, just as we expected.
If you want to see a list of tables from another database while still
using the bookstore
database, add a
FROM
clause to the previous statement:
SHOW TABLES FROM mysql;
This displays a list of tables from the mysql
database, even though the default database for the client session is the
bookstore
database.
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