public interface DatabaseMetaData
This class provides information about the database as a whole.
Many of the methods here return lists of information in ResultSets. You can use the normal ResultSet methods such as getString and getInt to retrieve the data from these ResultSets. If a given form of metadata is not available, these methods should throw a SQLException.
Some of these methods take arguments that are String patterns. These arguments all have names such as fooPattern. Within a pattern String, "%" means match any substring of 0 or more characters, and "_" means match any one character. Only metadata entries matching the search pattern are returned. If a search pattern argument is set to a null ref, it means that argument's criteria should be dropped from the search.
A SQLException will be thrown if a driver does not support a meta data method. In the case of methods that return a ResultSet, either a ResultSet (which may be empty) is returned or a SQLException is thrown.