DESCRIBE / DESC

DESCRIBE and DESC provide information about columns in a table.

Description

The DESCRIBE statement provides information about the columns in a table. DESC is a synonym for DESCRIBE. In MatrixOne, the output includes a 7th column Comment (which MySQL does not have), and type names are displayed in uppercase with display widths (e.g., INT(32), FLOAT(0)) instead of MySQL's lowercase format without widths (e.g., int, float).

Syntax

{DESCRIBE | DESC} tbl_name [col_name | wild]

Examples

drop table if exists t1;
create table t1(
    col1 int comment 'First column',
    col2 float,
    col3 varchar(100)
);

> desc t1;
+-------+--------------+------+------+---------+-------+---------------+
| Field | Type         | Null | Key  | Default | Extra | Comment       |
+-------+--------------+------+------+---------+-------+---------------+
| col1  | INT(32)      | YES  |      | NULL    |       | First column  |
| col2  | FLOAT(0)     | YES  |      | NULL    |       |               |
| col3  | VARCHAR(100) | YES  |      | NULL    |       |               |
+-------+--------------+------+------+---------+-------+---------------+
3 rows in set (0.00 sec)

!!! note
    Column name filtering (e.g., `DESC t1 col1`) is not supported in MatrixOne; specifying a column name still returns all columns.

> desc t1 col1;
+-------+--------------+------+------+---------+-------+---------------+
| Field | Type         | Null | Key  | Default | Extra | Comment       |
+-------+--------------+------+------+---------+-------+---------------+
| col1  | INT(32)      | YES  |      | NULL    |       | First column  |
| col2  | FLOAT(0)     | YES  |      | NULL    |       |               |
| col3  | VARCHAR(100) | YES  |      | NULL    |       |               |
+-------+--------------+------+------+---------+-------+---------------+
3 rows in set (0.00 sec)