DESCRIBE Statement

Important

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Confluent Cloud for Apache Flink®️ enables vewing the schema of an Apache Kafka® topic.

Syntax

{ DESCRIBE | DESC } [EXTENDED] [catalog_name.][db_name.]table_name

Description

DESCRIBE shows the schema of a table. DESCRIBE EXTENDED shows the schema of a table including system columns, such as the the timestamp.

Example

In the Confluent CLI, run the following commands to see an example of the DESCRIBE statement.

  1. Create a table.

    CREATE TABLE orders (
      `user` BIGINT NOT NULL,
      product STRING,
      amount INT,
      ts TIMESTAMP(3),
      PRIMARY KEY(`user`) NOT ENFORCED
    );
    

    Your output should resemble:

    [INFO] Execute statement succeed.
    
  2. View the table’s schema.

    DESCRIBE orders;
    

    Your output should resemble:

    +---------+-----------------------------+-------+-----------+---------------+----------------------------+
    |    name |                        type |  null |       key |        extras |                  watermark |
    +---------+-----------------------------+-------+-----------+---------------+----------------------------+
    |    user |                      BIGINT | FALSE | PRI(user) |               |                            |
    | product |                 VARCHAR(32) |  TRUE |           |               |                            |
    |  amount |                         INT |  TRUE |           |               |                            |
    |      ts |      TIMESTAMP(3) *ROWTIME* |  TRUE |           |               | `ts` - INTERVAL '1' SECOND |
    |   ptime | TIMESTAMP_LTZ(3) *PROCTIME* | FALSE |           | AS PROCTIME() |                            |
    +---------+-----------------------------+-------+-----------+---------------+----------------------------+
    5 rows in set