Well, something is going to need to know about the structure of your database (even it it's just a list of tables to dump). This knowledge can be encoded in one of two places. The most common is that your program needs to understand the relationships between the various tables.

The more flexible and generic (but far less common) solution would be if the database designers encoded this information in the database itself by using referential integrity constraints on all of the tables in the database. In this case you would be able to query the metadata tables in order to construct SQL to query the real tables. One possible problem is that the metadata tables vary a lot between different database systems - so a solution like this wouldn't work on different systems. I believe that the DBI team are working on adding generic metadata support to the DBI spec, but I don't know how far they've got or how well supported it is in individual DBD modules.

Executive summary - you probably can't do it.

--
<http://www.dave.org.uk>

"The first rule of Perl club is you do not talk about Perl club."
-- Chip Salzenberg

In reply to Re: How to display all the content of the database? by davorg
in thread How to display all the content of the database? by Alex the Serb

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