SQLProvider
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Querying for metadata from Information_Schema
I was wondering if their is a convenient way to use this library to pull metadata from a database. In pure SQL I would generally do this by querying the Information_Schema
view. For example, to get a list of columns in the table MyTableName
, I would do:
SELECT COLUMN_NAME
FROM INFORMATION_SCHEMA
WHERE TABLE_NAME = 'MyTableName'
The type provider does not appear to expose the Information_Schema view, so I was curious if there is standard way to obtain database metadata through this API. Thanks!
Each of the providers are using their own methods to get the schemas. But it's not exposed outside. I'm just curious what is the use-case for this? I'm not even sure if typically the runtime connection string user even has permissions to query the schema.
Generally this is just a quick and dirty method to become familiar with a new database. For example, if I have a database holding some time series data that I am unfamiliar with, I might want to pull the data from each column and plot it against the time data to get an idea of general trends over time. I have only ever done this through SSMS or Azure Data Studio, so you may be right that a connection string user doesn't have access to this information. It is not a big deal if the answer is simply "Nope, can't do it." I just figured I would check in and see if this was possible.