How to find all the tables in MySQL with specific

Question

I have 2-3 different column names that I want to look up in the entire DB and list out all tables which have those columns. Any easy script?

Answer 1

In version that do not have information_schema (older versions, or some ndb's) you can dump the table structure and search the column manually.

mysqldump -h$host -u$user -p$pass --compact --no-data --all-databases > some_file.sql

Now search the column name in some_file.sql using your preferred text editor, or use some nifty awk scripts.

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And a simple sed script to find the column, just replace COLUMN_NAME with your's:

sed -n '/^USE/{h};/^CREATE/{H;x;s/\nCREATE.*\n/\n/;x};/COLUMN_NAME/{x;p};' <some_file.sql
USE `DATABASE_NAME`;
CREATE TABLE `TABLE_NAME` (
  `COLUMN_NAME` varchar(10) NOT NULL,

You can pipe the dump directly in sed but that's trivial.

Answer 2

Use this one line query, replace desired_column_name by your column name.

SELECT TABLE_NAME FROM information_schema.columns WHERE column_name = 'desired_column_name';

Answer 3

SELECT DISTINCT TABLE_NAME FROM INFORMATION_SCHEMA.COLUMNS WHERE COLUMN_NAME LIKE '%city_id%' AND TABLE_SCHEMA='database'

Answer 4

More simply done in one line of SQL:

SELECT * FROM information_schema.columns WHERE column_name = 'column_name';

Answer 5

For those searching for the inverse of this, i.e. looking for tables that do not contain a certain column name, here is the query...

SELECT DISTINCT TABLE_NAME FROM information_schema.columns WHERE 
TABLE_SCHEMA = 'your_db_name' AND TABLE_NAME NOT IN (SELECT DISTINCT 
TABLE_NAME FROM information_schema.columns WHERE column_name = 
'column_name' AND TABLE_SCHEMA = 'your_db_name');

This came in really handy when we began to slowly implement use of InnoDB's special ai_col column and needed to figure out which of our 200 tables had yet to be upgraded.

Answer 6

To get all tables with columns columnA or ColumnB in the database YourDatabase:

SELECT DISTINCT TABLE_NAME 
    FROM INFORMATION_SCHEMA.COLUMNS
    WHERE COLUMN_NAME IN ('columnA','ColumnB')
        AND TABLE_SCHEMA='YourDatabase';