Question

I usually use SQLDeveloper to browse the database, but I couldn’t make it work with HSQLDB and I don’t know which tables are already created… I guess it’s a vendor-specific question and not plain SQL, but the point is: how can I see the tables so I can drop/alter them?

Answer 1

The ANSI SQL92 standard for querying database metadata is contained within the INFORMATION_SCHEMA data structures.

I have no idea whether your database supports this or not, but try the following:

SELECT * FROM   INFORMATION_SCHEMA.TABLES 

On further research, it appears that HSQLDB does support INFORMATION_SCHEMA, but with slightly non-standard naming.

All of the tables have SYSTEM_* prepended to them, so the above example would read

SELECT * FROM   INFORMATION_SCHEMA.SYSTEM_TABLES 

I have no means of testing this, and the answer was found on sourceforge.