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MDB2 | Retrieving table description / declaration

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  #1  
Old May 8th, 2008, 09:17 AM
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MDB2 | Retrieving table description / declaration
Since PEAR:B is being phased out, I figured I'd get the hang of MDB2 so I can migrate all things that need migrating.

Is there any SQL dialect-agnostic way in MDB2 to retrieve the declaration of a table? I'm hoping for a method somewhere that takes the name of a table, and returns an associative array, with each element being an array describing a field.

Does MDB2 offer such a feature, or am I stuck with vendor-specific queries like the following?
Code:
SHOW COLUMNS FROM sometable
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Old May 8th, 2008, 06:28 PM
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HI Analyser

So your wanting the table description or a mysqldump of the table to then re-import?

Can you just just use a query and execute it using the exec() function in MDB2?
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Old May 8th, 2008, 07:43 PM
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Why is this in PHP development?
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Old May 9th, 2008, 02:15 AM
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MDB2 is writtin in PHP? And if you put it in SQL no one would know what you are talking about - maybe.
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Old May 9th, 2008, 03:51 AM
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This is in the PHP forum instead of the MySQL forum because I'm asking if a library written in PHP supports a certain feature.

Basically, what I want is to tell MDB2, "Here's a DSN, and a table name. Which columns does the table have, and what are their types?".

I could of course, like I already mentioned, use a vendor specific query. If it were a table in a MySQL database, I could use a "DESCRIBE sometable;" query. That's all fine and dandy, but if I migrate my application to PostgreSQL or MS SQL Server, I'm screwed. The whole point is that I don't want to have to care what database the table is in; MDB2 is a db abstraction layer; does it abstract this away too, or doesn't it?

So, once again, I'm looking for a way to retrieve a table's definition in a generic way, without having to care which vendor it is from.
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Old May 9th, 2008, 06:07 AM
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No clue if this is of help, but a quick google and a couple of clicks found:

Quote:
smith [AT] pooteeweet [DOT] org
2006-11-16 19:39:19 (222)

you need to use the manager and reverse modules:
http://pear.php.net/manual/en/package.database.mdb2.intro-module.php


Quote:
hdixon [at] deltabrahvo [DOT] com
2006-11-16 19:35:30 (221)

the h in ahvo is a blind ..

In any case: I don't seem to be able to query using DESCRIBE <table>, or
SHOW COLUMNS FROM <table> or find any references to an equivalent, via MDB2
- which means I'll end up having to write db-platform specific "get table
metadata" functions after all .. kinda defeats the purpose of MDB2,
surely?.. -

H
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Analyser agrees: The full 9 points for your google skillz... Thanks!
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Old May 9th, 2008, 07:12 AM
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That's -exactly- what I was looking for! Thank you, Simon!

I'll have to remember that MDB2 apparently puts all these nifty advanced features in "modules". The Reverse module does exactly what I want; it has a tableInfo() method that returns an associative array of all the table's fields.

I've already got some testcode up and running. Now to find out how cross-platform this feature really is...

Again, thanks for the help, Simon!
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Old May 9th, 2008, 09:10 AM
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Happy to help!
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