Show and Describe are not in the SQL-92 standard , so you can't expect them to be supported.

DBI does allows the user to get a list of tables through the $dbh->tables command.

The way I get the column names is just run a bogus search: "select * from $table where 1 = 0". This should run very quickly and get me the information I want.

Here's a sample program:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

use strict;
use DBI;

my ($driver, $dbh, @tables);

$driver="DBI:CSV:f_dir=Tables";

$dbh=DBI->connect($driver) or die "Can't connect:  $DBI::errstr";

eval {
   @tables = $dbh->tables;
   @tables = grep { s/.*\.//o } @tables;

} or die "Couldn't retrieve list of tables: $DBI::errstr\n";

for my $thisTable (@tables) {
   eval {
      my $sth=$dbh->prepare("select * from $thisTable where 1 = 0");
      $sth->execute();
      my $columnRef=$sth->{NAME_lc};
      for my $thisColumn (@$columnRef) {
            print "Table: $thisTable, column is: $thisColumn\n";
            # Do whatever else you want with the columns.
      }
      1;
   } or die "Couldn't read table $_: $DBI::errstr\n";
}

$dbh->disconnect();
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A few things to note:

• My tables came out with names like "me".tablename, so I had to prune off the username part (I don't know how other DBDs will write this).
• The $dbh->tables function may not be supported. The DBI documentation says "This method is experimental and may change or disappear".

rick