Describing a table for Oracle (Pear)

[Nibinaear]

I'm trying to use pear to make my code work on both Oracle and Mysql. The problem I'm having is that I can't describe a table using the query function.

$query = $db->query("describe booking");

//if query caused error, exit
if(DB::iserror($query))
{
  die($query->getMessage());
}

This produces the error DB Error: syntax error, but works in MySQL. If I describe booking in Oracle SQL Plus, it works fine, as this is perfectly good sql code. The booking table is in no databases, the tables are just at the base-level so to speak.

$i=0;
//get rows from database
while($record = $query->fetchRow())
{
  $record = array_change_key_case($record, CASE_LOWER);

  if($dbtype == "mysqli")
  {
    echo "mysql problem<p />";
    $field[$i] = trim($record['field']);
    $i++;
  }
  else
  {
    echo "no problem<p />";
    $field[$i] = trim($record['name']);
    $i++;  

  }
}

The while loop here is not entered as the query doesn't work.

I need to find a way of describing the table in Oracle, but I can't remember how it's done. I think there is a way to do it using select.

select colname from ...where coltype = 'booking';

I seem to remember it started like that.

Nibinaear

[LordShryku]

I think the table you want is SYS.COL

SQL> desc sys.col
 Name                            Null?    Type
 ------------------------------- -------- ----
 TNAME                           NOT NULL VARCHAR2(30)
 COLNO                           NOT NULL NUMBER
 CNAME                           NOT NULL VARCHAR2(30)
 COLTYPE                                  VARCHAR2(106)
 WIDTH                           NOT NULL NUMBER
 SCALE                                    NUMBER
 PRECISION                                NUMBER
 NULLS                                    VARCHAR2(19)
 DEFAULTVAL                               LONG
 CHARACTER_SET_NAME                       VARCHAR2(44)

[Nibinaear]

Yep that works. The final query was:

select cname from sys.col where UPPER(tname) = UPPER('booking');

Many thanks to LordShryku.

🙂