Are bools bools in MySQL - no they're not! Lets show this:

mysql> show create table healthcheck\G

*************************** 1. row ***************************

Table: healthcheck

Create Table: CREATE TABLE `healthcheck` (

`isworking` tinyint(1) DEFAULT NULL

) ENGINE=MEMORY DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1

1 row in set (0.00 sec)

SELECT Field0[,Field1,Field2,...] FROM TABLE PROCEDURE ANALYSE() is a nice tool to find out more about your table’s columns.

Still, it could be improved in a lot of ways, and the stored procedure below is a starting point. It makes use of procedure analyse (though with ‘SELECT * FROM’), and modifies it’s output to include the actual column datatype and the total number of rows of the table.

The actual datatype is a piece of information I’ve seen a lot of people request, and the number of rows is, I think, a critical piece of information to determine if the output of procedure analyse is credible or not. It’s not the same thing to take suggestions from mysql on a table with 7 or 20 rows than from a table with 1000000 rows. Of course, remember than numbers alone mean nothing, you might just have 7 rows in a table