List database tables with SQLAlchemy

Question

I want to implement a function that gives information about all the tables (and their column names) that are present in a database (not only those created with SQLAlchemy).

Answer 1

While reflection/inspection is useful, I had trouble getting the data out of the database. I found sqlsoup to be much more user-friendly. You create the engine using sqlalchemy and pass that engine to sqlsoup.SQlSoup. ie:

import sqlsoup

def create_engine():
    from sqlalchemy import create_engine
    return create_engine(f"mysql+mysqlconnector://{database_username}:{database_pw}@{database_host}/{database_name}")

def test_sqlsoup():
    engine = create_engine()
    db = sqlsoup.SQLSoup(engine)
    # Note: database must have a table called 'users' for this example
    users = db.users.all()
    print(users)

if __name__ == "__main__":
    test_sqlsoup()

If you're familiar with sqlalchemy then you're familiar with sqlsoup. I've used this to extract data from a wordpress database.