24.8 Extensions to SHOW Statements

Some extensions to SHOW statements accompany the implementation of INFORMATION_SCHEMA:

SHOW can be used to get information about the structure of INFORMATION_SCHEMA itself.
Several SHOW statements accept a WHERE clause that provides more flexibility in specifying which rows to display.
The IS_UPDATABLE flag may be unreliable if a view depends on one or more other views, and one of these underlying views is updated. Regardless of the IS_UPDATABLE value, the server keeps track of the updatability of a view and correctly rejects data change operations to views that are not updatable. If the IS_UPDATABLE value for a view has become inaccurate to due to changes to underlying views, the value can be updated by deleting and recreating the view.

INFORMATION_SCHEMA is an information database, so its name is included in the output from SHOW DATABASES. Similarly, SHOW TABLES can be used with INFORMATION_SCHEMA to obtain a list of its tables:

mysql> SHOW TABLES FROM INFORMATION_SCHEMA;
+---------------------------------------+
| Tables_in_INFORMATION_SCHEMA          |
+---------------------------------------+
| CHARACTER_SETS                        |
| COLLATIONS                            |
| COLLATION_CHARACTER_SET_APPLICABILITY |
| COLUMNS                               |
| COLUMN_PRIVILEGES                     |
| ENGINES                               |
| EVENTS                                |
| FILES                                 |
| GLOBAL_STATUS                         |
| GLOBAL_VARIABLES                      |
| KEY_COLUMN_USAGE                      |
| PARTITIONS                            |
| PLUGINS                               |
| PROCESSLIST                           |
| REFERENTIAL_CONSTRAINTS               |
| ROUTINES                              |
| SCHEMATA                              |
| SCHEMA_PRIVILEGES                     |
| SESSION_STATUS                        |
| SESSION_VARIABLES                     |
| STATISTICS                            |
| TABLES                                |
| TABLE_CONSTRAINTS                     |
| TABLE_PRIVILEGES                      |
| TRIGGERS                              |
| USER_PRIVILEGES                       |
| VIEWS                                 |
+---------------------------------------+

SHOW COLUMNS and DESCRIBE can display information about the columns in individual INFORMATION_SCHEMA tables.

SHOW statements that accept a LIKE clause to limit the rows displayed also permit a WHERE clause that specifies more general conditions that selected rows must satisfy:

SHOW CHARACTER SET
SHOW COLLATION
SHOW COLUMNS
SHOW DATABASES
SHOW FUNCTION STATUS
SHOW INDEX
SHOW OPEN TABLES
SHOW PROCEDURE STATUS
SHOW STATUS
SHOW TABLE STATUS
SHOW TABLES
SHOW TRIGGERS
SHOW VARIABLES

The WHERE clause, if present, is evaluated against the column names displayed by the SHOW statement. For example, the SHOW CHARACTER SET statement produces these output columns:

mysql> SHOW CHARACTER SET;
+----------+-----------------------------+---------------------+--------+
| Charset  | Description                 | Default collation   | Maxlen |
+----------+-----------------------------+---------------------+--------+
| big5     | Big5 Traditional Chinese    | big5_chinese_ci     |      2 |
| dec8     | DEC West European           | dec8_swedish_ci     |      1 |
| cp850    | DOS West European           | cp850_general_ci    |      1 |
| hp8      | HP West European            | hp8_english_ci      |      1 |
| koi8r    | KOI8-R Relcom Russian       | koi8r_general_ci    |      1 |
| latin1   | cp1252 West European        | latin1_swedish_ci   |      1 |
| latin2   | ISO 8859-2 Central European | latin2_general_ci   |      1 |
...

To use a WHERE clause with SHOW CHARACTER SET, you would refer to those column names. As an example, the following statement displays information about character sets for which the default collation contains the string 'japanese':

mysql> SHOW CHARACTER SET WHERE `Default collation` LIKE '%japanese%';
+---------+---------------------------+---------------------+--------+
| Charset | Description               | Default collation   | Maxlen |
+---------+---------------------------+---------------------+--------+
| ujis    | EUC-JP Japanese           | ujis_japanese_ci    |      3 |
| sjis    | Shift-JIS Japanese        | sjis_japanese_ci    |      2 |
| cp932   | SJIS for Windows Japanese | cp932_japanese_ci   |      2 |
| eucjpms | UJIS for Windows Japanese | eucjpms_japanese_ci |      3 |
+---------+---------------------------+---------------------+--------+

This statement displays the multibyte character sets:

mysql> SHOW CHARACTER SET WHERE Maxlen > 1;
+---------+---------------------------+---------------------+--------+
| Charset | Description               | Default collation   | Maxlen |
+---------+---------------------------+---------------------+--------+
| big5    | Big5 Traditional Chinese  | big5_chinese_ci     |      2 |
| ujis    | EUC-JP Japanese           | ujis_japanese_ci    |      3 |
| sjis    | Shift-JIS Japanese        | sjis_japanese_ci    |      2 |
| euckr   | EUC-KR Korean             | euckr_korean_ci     |      2 |
| gb2312  | GB2312 Simplified Chinese | gb2312_chinese_ci   |      2 |
| gbk     | GBK Simplified Chinese    | gbk_chinese_ci      |      2 |
| utf8    | UTF-8 Unicode             | utf8_general_ci     |      3 |
| ucs2    | UCS-2 Unicode             | ucs2_general_ci     |      2 |
| cp932   | SJIS for Windows Japanese | cp932_japanese_ci   |      2 |
| eucjpms | UJIS for Windows Japanese | eucjpms_japanese_ci |      3 |
+---------+---------------------------+---------------------+--------+