On Thu, 11 Oct 2001 Bob Tanner wrote: > Quoting Stephen R. Wilcoxon (wilcoxon at bridge.com): > > What is the database behind the ODBC datasource? There is no uniform way > > of extracting a schema from a database. Oracle's info is all stored in the > > sys_* views and/or v$* tables. Sybase's info is all stored in dbo.sys* > > tables. MS SQL Server is probably similar to Sybase (or, at least, it was > > identical at one point). > > Ahh, that answers the question. I made a bad assuption that ODBC allowed a open > standard to the database schema as well. > > Behind the ODBC connection is a funky little database called DB/TextWorks. It's > a db specialized for libraries. I'm pretty sure ODBC does indeed define a db-independent means to access the database schema. However, this functionality might not be supported by all ODBC drivers. The following links may be of interest (Win32::ODBC Perl module): http://www.roth.net/perl/odbc/ http://www.roth.net/perl/odbc/docs/Object/ The Win32::ODBC object provides some meta-data methods such as TableList(), FieldNames(), and Catalog(). Otherwise, I think it's also possible to directly invoke subroutines defined in the ODBC DLLs using Visual Basic or Visual C++ ... Joel