Now that we have a majority of the data already in the Database, we now need to work out how to get meaningful information back out !

Thankfully MySQL does provide us with a way of doing this. In the following example my main database containing the DBC data and we are going to query for records for MangosZero - so tables beginning dbc0_

SELECT DISTINCT TABLE_NAME AS DBCFilename FROM information_schema.columns
WHERE table_schema = 'dbc' AND table_name LIKE 'dbc0_%'

This returns a nice list of DBC filenames belonging to Zero, we can easily write a tool to read through that list and process the information.

DBCFilename
dbc0_animationdata
dbc0_areapoi

For the purpose of a demonstration of how to get the field information for a certain table, see the following query. Again we are using the database 'dbc' but this time we are looking for a specific table (dbc0_animationdata)

SELECT COLUMN_NAME,ORDINAL_POSITION,DATA_TYPE,COLUMN_TYPE FROM information_schema.columns
WHERE table_schema = 'dbc' AND table_name = 'dbc0_animationdata%'

This returns the following:

"COLUMN_NAME"         "ORDINAL_POSITION"    "DATA_TYPE"    "COLUMN_TYPE"
"AnimationDataId"            "1"               "int"         "int(11)"
"Name"                       "2"               "text"        "text"
"WeaponFlags"                "3"               "int"         "int(11)"
"Bodyflags"                  "4"               "int"         "int(11)"
"Flags"                      "5"               "int"         "int(11)"
"FallbackAnimationDataId"    "6"               "int"         "int(11)"
"PreviousAnimationDataId"    "7"               "int"         "int(11)"

For the guts of the data we need, this is everything we need... until next time