RoR, Judge Judy, and little old ladies

[James Dennett]

Andrei Alexandrescu (See Website For Email) wrote:

> Interesting. So here's a limitation that might be addressed. Do all of
> today's database engines (e.g. mysql) offer structure inspection (e.g.
> "enumerate tables in this database", "enumerate fields in this table"...)?

In my experience, yes (MySQL does, SQLite does, and all
of the more traditional RDBMS's do, including PostgreSQL,
Oracle, DB2, MS SQL Server, and many more).  This level
of "reflection" is standard.  In older versions of MySQL
it was accessible only via special APIs, but normally it
is available via system tables/views with names something
like SYS_ALL_TABLES, SYS_ALL_COLUMNS, etc., which have
columns for name, type, etc, so that SQL is the interface
to this metadata.

-- James