I want to list and describe the tables present in an Oracle database.
To do this by connecting to the database with a client such as SQL Plus, a working approach is:
List the tables:
select tablespace_name, table_name from all_tables;
Get columns and data types for each table:
describe [table_name];
However when using cx_Oracle through python, cur.execute('describe [table_name]') results in an 'invalid sql' error.
How can we use describe with cx_Oracle in python?
It seems you can't.
From cx_Oracle instead of describe use:
cur.execute('select column_name, data_type from all_tab_columns where table_name = [table_name]')
(From Richard Moore here http://cx-oracle-users.narkive.com/suaWH9nn/cx-oracle4-3-1-describe-table-query-is-not-working)
As noted by others there is no ability to describe directly. I created a set of libraries and tools that let you do this, however. You can see them here: https://github.com/anthony-tuininga/cx_OracleTools.
