I'm familiar with the java.sql.DatabaseMetaData
interface, but I find it quite clunky to use. For example, in order to find out the table names, you have to call getTables
and loop through the returned ResultSet
, using well-known literals as the column names.
Is there an easier way to obtain database metadata?
It's easily done using DdlUtils:
import javax.sql.DataSource;
import org.apache.ddlutils.Platform;
import org.apache.ddlutils.PlatformFactory;
import org.apache.ddlutils.model.Database;
import org.apache.ddlutils.platform.hsqldb.HsqlDbPlatform;
public void readMetaData(final DataSource dataSource) {
final Platform platform = PlatformFactory.createNewPlatformInstance(dataSource);
final Database database = platform.readModelFromDatabase("someName");
// Inspect the database as required; has objects like Table/Column/etc.
}
Take a look at SchemaCrawler (free and open source), which is another API designed for this purpose. Some sample SchemaCrawler code:
// Create the options
final SchemaCrawlerOptions options = new SchemaCrawlerOptions();
// Set what details are required in the schema - this affects the
// time taken to crawl the schema
options.setSchemaInfoLevel(SchemaInfoLevel.standard());
options.setShowStoredProcedures(false);
// Sorting options
options.setAlphabeticalSortForTableColumns(true);
// Get the schema definition
// (the database connection is managed outside of this code snippet)
final Database database = SchemaCrawlerUtility.getDatabase(connection, options);
for (final Catalog catalog: database.getCatalogs())
{
for (final Schema schema: catalog.getSchemas())
{
System.out.println(schema);
for (final Table table: schema.getTables())
{
System.out.print("o--> " + table);
if (table instanceof View)
{
System.out.println(" (VIEW)");
}
else
{
System.out.println();
}
for (final Column column: table.getColumns())
{
System.out.println(" o--> " + column + " (" + column.getType()
+ ")");
}
}
}
}
http://schemacrawler.sourceforge.net/