Back when I was doing a lot of work with Oracle, I learned to lean heavily on the SYSTEM views - Oracle’s equivalent to the INFORMATION_SCHEMA database. These views can really help you when it comes to writing dynamic SQL in stored procedures, or just taking quick shortcuts while you’re writing code. Or, if you’re like me, using the information schema can really help you limit the number of types you make.

Let’s take a simple case. You want to insert a row into a table that has multiple columns. You can hand type all those columns, but for me, that’s takes time and by the time I’m done debugging all the typos, it takes a really long time. Instead I just fire up a separate mysql client in silent mode and run a simple query:

SELECT concat(column_name,', ') 
  FROM information_schema COLUMNS 
 WHERE table_schema = "myschema" 
   AND table_name = "mytable";

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