Easiest way to obtain database metadata in Java?

Question

I'm familiar with the java.sql.DatabaseMetaData interface, but I find it quite clunky to use. For example, in order to find out the table names, you have to call getTables and loop through the returned ResultSet, using well-known literals as the column names.

Is there an easier way to obtain database metadata?

Answer 1

It's easily done using DdlUtils:

import javax.sql.DataSource;
import org.apache.ddlutils.Platform;
import org.apache.ddlutils.PlatformFactory;
import org.apache.ddlutils.model.Database;
import org.apache.ddlutils.platform.hsqldb.HsqlDbPlatform;

public void readMetaData(final DataSource dataSource) {
  final Platform platform = PlatformFactory.createNewPlatformInstance(dataSource);
  final Database database = platform.readModelFromDatabase("someName");
  // Inspect the database as required; has objects like Table/Column/etc.
}