Explore MySQL from the shell
By: Johnathon Wright on: September 08, 2009
I just discovered mysqlshow -- every developer who uses a database should know about this utility. (though I've createded an alias describe, which seems much more intuitive.)
I constantly find myself going into script/console to get a list of the fields for a model, or other db-specific info. This solution is much faster.
given no inputs, it shows a list of databases. Given a database name, it shows a list of tables. Given a table name, it describes the fields.
And, since it's in the shell, you have access to grep, etc.
describe.bat looks like this:
mysqlshow -u local %1 %2 %3
in my sql I created a user "local" and grant select on . to local;
describe myapp roles
Enjoy!