Question

The docs don’t mention ORDER BY and I have had no luck phrasing this query:

SHOW FIELDS FROM `TB_Main`  WHERE Type = 'mediumtext' OR Type = 'bit(1)' ORDER BY Field;

Do I have to do my ordering in my scripting?

Answer 1

You can directly query the information schema tables instead. As the manual says:

The following statements are nearly equivalent:

SELECT COLUMN_NAME, DATA_TYPE, IS_NULLABLE, COLUMN_DEFAULT
  FROM INFORMATION_SCHEMA.COLUMNS
  WHERE table_name = 'tbl_name'
  [AND table_schema = 'db_name']
  [AND column_name LIKE 'wild']

SHOW COLUMNS
  FROM tbl_name
  [FROM db_name]
  [LIKE 'wild']

You can apply an ORDER BY clause to the first type of statement, since it is a normal SELECT command.

Therefore, in place of your SHOW command, you can do:

SELECT COLUMN_NAME, DATA_TYPE, IS_NULLABLE, COLUMN_DEFAULT
FROM INFORMATION_SCHEMA.COLUMNS
WHERE
      TABLE_NAME = 'TB_Main'
  AND COLUMN_TYPE IN ('mediumtext', 'bit(1)')
ORDER BY COLUMN_NAME;