Book Image

MariaDb Essentials

Book Image

MariaDb Essentials

Overview of this book

This book will take you through all the nitty-gritty parts of MariaDB, right from the creation of your database all the way to using MariaDB’s advanced features. At the very beginning, we show you the basics, that is, how to install MariaDB. Then, we walk you through the databases and tables of MariaDB, and introduce SQL in MariaDB. You will learn about all the features that have been added in MariaDB but are absent in MySQL. Moving on, you’ll learn to import and export data, views, virtual columns, and dynamic columns in MariaDB. Then, you’ll get to grips with full-text searches and queries in MariaDb. You’ll also be familiarized with the CONNECT storage engine. At the end of the book, you’ll be introduced to the community of MariaDB.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
MariaDB Essentials
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Working with metadata


Sometimes, we may want to check the structure of an existing table. For a user, the quickest way is often the SHOW CREATE TABLE statement. This command returns the CREATE TABLE statement that can be used to recreate an identical table. For example:

MariaDB [test]> SHOW CREATE TABLE example \G
*************************** 1. row ***************************
       Table: example
Create Table: CREATE TABLE `example` (
  `column1` char(1) NOT NULL DEFAULT '' COMMENT 'This is a column comment',
  KEY `idx1` (`column1`) COMMENT 'An index comment'
) ENGINE=InnoDB DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8 COMMENT='This table is just an example'
1 row in set (0.00 sec)

However, parsing a CREATE TABLE statement is a hard task for programs. For this reason, the following two commands return a table's metadata as a relational table:

  • SHOW COLUMNS FROM <table_name> (or DESC <table_name>) provides information about the columns

  • SHOW KEYS FROM <table_name> provides information about...