Question

I know about show tables and describe <table_name> commends from mysql, but I’ll like to know if thee is any solution which will show me all the tables from a database togheter with the number of columns from each table.

It that possible?

The thing is that i need to compare two databases (with 52 tables each), which seems to have the same structure, but I’m not very sure.

Answer 1

It is a very easy thing to do, MySQL keeps information about its databases in the information_schema database, this acts as the metadata for MySQL so you can find pretty much any information you need provided you have the right privileges to access that database.
I just tested this on MySQL 5.1.54, run it in any database to get the tables with their associated number of columns

SELECT table_name, COUNT(column_name) AS num_columns 
FROM information_schema.statistics S     
WHERE table_schema = DATABASE()
GROUP BY table_name
ORDER BY table_name