Select data from "show tables" MySQL query

Question

I think you want SELECT * FROM INFORMATION_SCHEMA.TABLES

See http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/tables-table.html

Not that I know of, unless you select from INFORMATION_SCHEMA, as others have mentioned.

However, the SHOW command is pretty flexible, E.g.:

SHOW tables like '%s%'

To count:

SELECT COUNT(*) as total FROM (SELECT TABLE_NAME as tab, TABLES.* FROM INFORMATION_SCHEMA.TABLES WHERE TABLE_SCHEMA='database_name' GROUP BY tab) tables;

To list:

SELECT TABLE_NAME as table, TABLES.* FROM INFORMATION_SCHEMA.TABLES WHERE TABLE_SCHEMA='database_name' GROUP BY table;

You can't put SHOW statements inside a subquery like in your example. The only statement that can go in a subquery is SELECT.

As other answers have stated, you can query the INFORMATION_SCHEMA directly with SELECT and get a lot more flexibility that way.

MySQL's SHOW statements are internally just queries against the INFORMATION_SCHEMA tables.

User @physicalattraction has posted this comment on most other answers:

This gives you (meta)information about the tables, not the contents of the table, as the OP intended. – physicalattraction

On the contrary, the OP's question does not say that they want to select the data in all the tables. They say they want to select from the result of SHOW TABLES, which is just a list of table names.

If the OP does want to select all data from all tables, then the answer is no, you can't do it with one query. Each query must name its tables explicitly. You can't make a table name be a variable or the result of another part of the same query. Also, all rows of a given query result must have the same columns.

So the only way to select all data from all tables would be to run SHOW TABLES and then for each table named in that result, run another query.

You may be closer than you think — SHOW TABLES already behaves a lot like a SELECT statement. Here's a PHP example of how you might fetch its "rows":

$pdo = new PDO("mysql:host=$host;dbname=$dbname",$user,$pass);
foreach ($pdo->query("SHOW TABLES") as $row) {
    print "Table $row[Tables_in_$dbname]\n";
}

SHOW TABLES behaves like a SELECT on a one-column table. That column name is Tables_in_ plus the database name.

SELECT * FROM INFORMATION_SCHEMA.TABLES

That should be a good start. For more, check INFORMATION_SCHEMA Tables.