How To See the CREATE TABLE Statement of an Existing Table in MySQL?

If you want to know how an existing table was created, you can use the "SHOW CREATE TABLE" command to get a copy of the "CREATE TABLE" statement back on an existing table. The following tutorial script shows you a good example:

mysql> SHOW CREATE TABLE tip;

+-------+-------------------------------
| Table | Create Table
+-------+-------------------------------
| tip   | CREATE TABLE `tip` (
  `id` int(11) NOT NULL,
  `subject` varchar(80) NOT NULL,
  `description` varchar(256) NOT NULL,
  `create_date` date default NULL,
  PRIMARY KEY  (`id`)
) ENGINE=MyISAM DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1 |
+-------+-------------------------------
1 row in set (0.38 sec)

Comparing with the original "CREATE TABLE" statement used in the previous tutorial, the output tells you that:

• INTEGER data type was replaced by "int(11)".
• Default database engine "MyISAM" was used for the table.
• Default character set "latin1" was used for the table.

⇒ Creating New Tables with SELECT Statements in MySQL

⇐ Show All Columns of an Existing Table in MySQL

⇑ CREATE, ALTER and DROP Statements in MySQL

⇑⇑ MySQL Database Tutorials