DESCRIBE or how to check if a field already exists

Written on Tuesday, October 07, 2014 by Alexander Dumke / Tags: Programming, MariaDB

If you need to check if a field already exists, the DESCRIBE function is used.

If you execute the following command with MariaDB:

DESCRIBE `article` `tags`

If the field exists, it returns the following information back to the field.

Field	Type	Null	Key	Default	Extra
tags	varchar(50)	NO

And for what I need it? The best example is certainly when you have to write update routines.

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