How to find a column in database
Nilesh wrote up a nice little ditty about the dba_tab_cols data dicitonary view. It is a great tool to use and I've used it quite a bit for poking around schemas other people have designed and figuring out just where I put that column when I don't have an ER diagram handy.
One this he forgot to mention: all_tab_cols. This is especially useful when you don't have DBA access to a system. For instance, I have an account on a database in another department at work. I needed to find a person's phone number but it wasn't where I expected. A quick query of:
select owner,table_name from all_tab_cols where column_name like '%PHONE%
turned up quite a few leads.
I wonder how many other little tricks people have for poking around systems that one might not be too familiar with.
