Something that has been puzzling me for a bit now, and an hour or two of googlin’ hasn’t really revealed any useful answers on the subject, so I figured I’d just write the question.
When I create a database in SQL using ‘CREATE DATABASE DBNAME’ am I implicitly creating a catalog in that database? Is it proper to refer to that ‘DBNAME’ as a catalog? Or is it something completely unrelated?
When I use the MySQL JDBC driver to get the list of tables in a database using the getMetaData() function, the “TABLE_CAT” column (which I would assume means ‘catalog’) is always set to the name of the database I’ve choosen.
Coincidence? Or am I just completely wrong on all of this?
catalog is the JDBC term for what many people (and some RDBMs) call databases. i.e. a collection of tables/views/etc. within a database system.