1.8 Database introspection

The SQL-ODBC library offers introspection features to allow you to determine the structure of a database at run time. A database structure is a hierarchy comprising catalogs, schemas, tables and columns. A catalog is a named collection of schemas, a schema is a named collection of tables, and a table is a named collection of columns. For security reasons, the SQL-ODBC library does not provide any means of obtaining a list of databases available from a particular DBMS; your application must provide access to a particular database via a connection object.

For DBMSes which do not support catalogs or schemas, the SQL-ODBC library uses a default value that your application can use to perform introspection.

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OLE, COM, ActiveX and DBMS Reference - 31 MAR 2000