And, praytell, what level of compliance with ANSI SQL-92 requires INFORMATION_SCHEMA.TABLES to exist, and which databases provide it? Remember that vendors are allowed to declare compliance with the standard when they have only complied with a fairly small subset of the features it specifies.

For the record, I just grabbed a connection to the first thing that came to hand (Oracle 8) and found that it does not support this. Portability obviously doesn't mean portable to THAT...

Also please edit your post to use relative URLs rather than absolute ones. See Warn people who have perlmonks in a URL? for more on that.