EXPLAIN Statement TRADITIONAL | JSON | TREE } explainable_stmt : { SELECT statement | TABLE statement | DELETE statement | INSERT statement | REPLACE statement | UPDATE statement } mysql>  DESCRIBE City; The  DESCRIBE  and  EXPLAIN  statements are synonyms. In practice, the  DESCRIBE  keyword is more often used to obtain information about table structure, whereas  EXPLAIN  is used to obtain a query execution plan (that is, an explanation of how MySQL would execute a query). The following discussion uses the  DESCRIBE  and  EXPLAIN  keywords in accordance with those uses, but the MySQL parser treats them as completely synonymous. DESCRIBE  provides information about the columns in a table: DESCRIBE  is a shortcut for  SHOW COLUMNS . These statements also display information for views. The description for  SHOW COLUMNS  provides more information about the output columns. See Section 13.7.7.5, “SHOW COLUMNS Statement” . By default,  DESCRIBE  displays information about all columns in the table.  col_name , if given, is the name of a column in the table. In this case, the statement displays information only for the named column.  wild , if given, is a pattern string. It can contain the SQL  %  and  _  wildcard characters. In this case, the statement displays output only for the columns with names matching the string. There is no need to enclose the string within quotation marks unless it contains spaces or other special characters. The  DESCRIBE  statement is provided for compatibility with Oracle. The  SHOW CREATE TABLE ,  SHOW TABLE STATUS , and  SHOW INDEX  statements also provide information about tables. See Section 13.7.7, “SHOW Statements” . The  EXPLAIN  statement provides information about how MySQL executes statements: 2983 Obtaining Execution Plan Information Obtaining Table Structure Information •Obtaining Table Structure Information •Obtaining Execution Plan Information •Obtaining Information with EXPLAIN ANALYZE +------------+----------+------+-----+---------+----------------+ | Field | Type | Null | Key | Default | Extra | +------------+----------+------+-----+---------+----------------+ | Id | int(11) | NO | PRI | NULL | auto_increment | | Name | char(35) | NO | | | | | Country | char(3) | NO | UNI | | | | District | char(20) | YES | MUL | | | | Population | int(11) | NO | | 0 | | +------------+----------+------+-----+---------+----------------+