You can also get a lot of good info from the Statement Handle Attributes. (p. 227 of Cheetah)

$sth->{NAME}
$sth->{TYPE}
$sth->{NULLABLE}

Also the 'Perl' chapter in the O'Reilly MySQL & mSQL book as a few cool scripts that will print out info about your database and tables. One script, tabledump.cgi (on page 159), will show you information about a specific table, much like a DESC. There is nothing MySQL specific about these scripts so you can give them a go with Oracle.

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