How do I query an Oracle database to display the names of all tables in it?
SELECT owner, table_name FROM all_tables; This query returns the following list of tables that contain all the tables that the user has access to in the entire database.
If you want to list all tables in the Oracle database, you can query the dba_tables view. SELECT table_name FROM dba_tables ORDER BY table_name ASC; This view (and all others starting with dba_) are meant for database administrators.
Querying user_tables
and dba_tables
didn't work.
This one did:
select table_name from all_tables
SELECT owner, table_name FROM dba_tables
This is assuming that you have access to the DBA_TABLES
data dictionary view. If you do not have those privileges but need them, you can request that the DBA explicitly grants you privileges on that table, or, that the DBA grants you the SELECT ANY DICTIONARY
privilege or the SELECT_CATALOG_ROLE
role (either of which would allow you to query any data dictionary table). Of course, you may want to exclude certain schemas like SYS
and SYSTEM
which have large numbers of Oracle tables that you probably don't care about.
Alternatively, if you do not have access to DBA_TABLES
, you can see all the tables that your account has access to through the ALL_TABLES
view:
SELECT owner, table_name FROM all_tables
Although, that may be a subset of the tables available in the database (ALL_TABLES
shows you the information for all the tables that your user has been granted access to).
If you are only concerned with the tables that you own, not those that you have access to, you could use USER_TABLES
:
SELECT table_name FROM user_tables
Since USER_TABLES
only has information about the tables that you own, it does not have an OWNER
column – the owner, by definition, is you.
Oracle also has a number of legacy data dictionary views-- TAB
, DICT
, TABS
, and CAT
for example-- that could be used. In general, I would not suggest using these legacy views unless you absolutely need to backport your scripts to Oracle 6. Oracle has not changed these views in a long time so they often have problems with newer types of objects. For example, the TAB
and CAT
views both show information about tables that are in the user's recycle bin while the [DBA|ALL|USER]_TABLES
views all filter those out. CAT
also shows information about materialized view logs with a TABLE_TYPE
of "TABLE" which is unlikely to be what you really want. DICT
combines tables and synonyms and doesn't tell you who owns the object.
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