I really need to know all the unique values before I can design my table scheme.
No, you don't need to know all the unique values. You only need to know a few pieces of metadata describing the kind of data in each column, such as the length of the longest value (so you know whether VARCHAR(15) is enough or if one or more values require VARCHAR(16)), possibly the length of the shortest value (if you want to try to use CHAR instead of VARCHAR where possible), a flag for whether the column is numeric-only (if you want to use numeric types instead of VARCHAR where possible), and, for numeric columns, the minimum/maximum values (so you can choose a numeric type with an appropriate range).

The only scenario which would require you to know all possible values for each column would be if you were intending to define each column's type as an enum, which I would consider to fall under the "pathological database designs" heading.

In reply to Re^3: Possible faster way to do this? by dsheroh
in thread Possible faster way to do this? by Anonymous Monk

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