> Isn't irrelevant what Perl thinks of a variable's type when DB already knows/was told what the type of that column should be at create time? some testing on MariaDB

CREATE TABLE `t_test_type` (
    `f_num` INT(11) NULL DEFAULT NULL,
    `f_str` CHAR(50) NULL DEFAULT NULL
)
ENGINE=MyISAM
;
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It looks like you could get what you want from the ansi information_schema and a query like the one below that worked for me under MySQL. I have read that not all DBMS support information_schema.

> SELECT column_name, data_type FROM information_schema.columns
WHERE table_name = 't_test_type' AND column_name IN ('f_num', 'f_str')
+;

+-------------+-----------+
| column_name | data_type |
+-------------+-----------+
| f_num       | int       |
| f_str       | char      |
+-------------+-----------+
2 rows in set (0.00 sec)
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DBI has a column_info method that seems to guarantee DATA_TYPE code and TYPE_NAME fields, if implemented by the driver which should be true for MariaDB based (only) on looking at the source.

#!/usr/bin/env perl

use warnings;
use strict;

use DBI;

my $dsn = "DBI:mysql:database=mysql";
my $dbh = DBI->connect($dsn,
    ... , #user name and password
    { RaiseError => 1 }
) or die $DBI::errstr;

my $info = $dbh->column_info(
    undef, 'mysql', 't_test_type', '%'
)->fetchall_hashref('COLUMN_NAME');
while (my ($col, $col_info) = each %$info) {
    print "$col $col_info->{ DATA_TYPE } $col_info->{ TYPE_NAME }\n";
}
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f_str 1 CHAR
f_num 4 INT
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