Chapter 30. The SHOW, DESCRIBE, and HELP Statements

30.1 Introduction

Everywhere in this book you can see examples of the SHOW statement. With these statements, you can show information stored in the catalog tables. Consider a SHOW statement as a predefined SELECT statement on the catalog. The result of this statement is a table, just as with a SELECT statement. This chapter lists all the SHOW statements with their corresponding definitions and discusses the DESCRIBE and the HELP statements. These three statements belong to the group called the informative statements.

Note that all the SHOW and DESCRIBE statements access the tables in the MYSQL and INFORMATION_SCHEMA databases, not our catalog views.

30.2 Overview of SHOW Statements

SHOW CHARACTER ...

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