Databricks-sqlalchemy-Use System tables to fetch metadata

[SomanathSankara]

Current Databricks Sql Alchemy uses describe command/show schema/table to get metadata
Can we use system tables to get metadata

[kravets-levko]

Hi @SomanathSankara! Sorry, but I don't think I understand what the question is. Can you please elaborate it a bit?

[SomanathSankara]

hi @kravets-levko correct my understanding.
Currently sqlalchemy (databricks ) package is using show table comand , show columns command to get table ,column details.
Cant we use UC system table(information schema) to fetch these details which will be faster

[susodapop]

Adding some signal here: yes the system tables can be used to reflect the database schema. This would require Unity Catalog on the target instance, so it would be good to maintain a fallback to the existing SHOW TABLES behavior. But there's no technical limitation of SQLAlchemy that blocks this manner of implementation.

[bob-skowron]

Hi all. I was looking at potentially implementing this and submitting a PR. For some background, I'm running into an issue using alembic to manage migrations for Databricks and if the schema does not exist, alembic throws an error because it's passing through the error from SHOW TABLES FROM <invalid_schema>.

I had a couple comments/questions:

1. information_schema only contains actual structures. It will not contain temporary tables or views. I see the get_view_names has a specific parameter for this, but do we see this as a limitation?
2. If we do need the temporary tables/views (and thus have to use SHOW TABLES/VIEWS), is there any objection to modifying the code to catch any DDL errors and returning an empty array with a logged warning instead? Could also check if the requested schema is in the available schemas and return that way as well