Question

Is there is a way MySQL to get the column names given the value of the column?

For example I have STATES table and CITY table which have 'NAME' as column name.

Say I have 'New York' in both STATES table and CITY table. I want a query which will return the column names of SATES and CITY give 'New York'.

My Expected Output could be like

value             column         Table

—–               ——            —–

New York       NAME       STATES

New York       NAME       CITY

Above is just an example. In most of the cases i only know the column values and i dont know the Column names or the corresponding table Names. Generally I need not know on the diffrent random schema’s. I am building a question answersing system that will work with multiple databases.

Answer 1

When querying, to help prevent ambiguity, always qualify the fields with alias.column such as

select states.name,
       city.name as CityName
   from
      city
         join states
           on city.stateabbrev = states.stateabbrev
   where
      city.name = 'New York'