mariadb-show

Shows the structure of a MariaDB database (databases, tables, columns and indexes).

Prior to MariaDB 10.5, the client was called mysqlshow. It can still be accessed under this name, via a symlink in Linux, or an alternate binary in Windows.

You can also use SHOW DATABASES, SHOW TABLES, SHOW COLUMNS, SHOW INDEX and SHOW TABLE STATUS, as well as the Information Schema tables (TABLES, COLUMNS, STATISTICS), to get similar functionality.

Using mariadb-show

mariadb-show [OPTIONS] [database [table [column]]]

The output displays only the names of those databases, tables, or columns for which you have some privileges.

If no database is given then all matching databases are shown. If no table is given, then all matching tables in database are shown. If no column is given, then all matching columns and column types in table are shown.

If the last argument contains a shell or SQL wildcard (*,?,% or _) then only what's matched by the wildcard is shown. If a database name contains any underscores, those should be escaped with a backslash (some Unix shells require two) to get a list of the proper tables or columns. “*” and “?” characters are converted into SQL “%” and “_” wildcard characters. This might cause some confusion when you try to display the columns for a table with a “_” in the name, because in this case, mariadb-show shows you only the table names that match the pattern. This is easily fixed by adding an extra “%” last on the command line as a separate argument.

Options

mariadb-show supports the following options:

Option Files

In addition to reading options from the command-line, mariadb-show can also read options from option files. If an unknown option is provided to mariadb-show in an option file, then it is ignored.

The following options relate to how MariaDB command-line tools handles option files. They must be given as the first argument on the command-line:

In MariaDB 10.2 and later, mariadb-show is linked with MariaDB Connector/C. However, MariaDB Connector/C does not yet handle the parsing of option files for this client. That is still performed by the server option file parsing code. See MDEV-19035 for more information.

Option Groups

mariadb-show reads options from the following option groups from option files:

Examples

Getting a list of databases:

bin/mariadb-show
+--------------------+
|     Databases      |
+--------------------+
| information_schema |
| test               |
+--------------------+

Getting a list of tables in the test database:

bin/mariadb-show test
Database: test
+---------+
| Tables  |
+---------+
| author  |
| book    |
| city    |
| country |
+---------+

Getting a list of columns in the test.book table:

bin/mariadb-show test book
Database: test  Table: book
+-----------+-----------------------+-------------------+------+-----+---------+----------------+--------------------------------+---------+
| Field     | Type                  | Collation         | Null | Key | Default | Extra          | Privileges                      | Comment |
+-----------+-----------------------+-------------------+------+-----+---------+----------------+--------------------------------+---------+
| id        | mediumint(8) unsigned |                   | NO   | PRI |         | auto_increment | select,insert,update,references |         |
| title     | varchar(200)          | latin1_swedish_ci | NO   |     |         |                | select,insert,update,references |         |
| author_id | smallint(5) unsigned  |                   | NO   | MUL |         |                | select,insert,update,references |         |
+-----------+-----------------------+-------------------+------+-----+---------+----------------+--------------------------------+---------+