For our purposes we’re particularly interested in the tables metadata, which we can query to actually extract the size of various tables in the system. Everything from views and user_privilieges to columns and tables can be found in the INFORMATION_SCHEMA. Regardless of the name, what matters is the information provided by these INFORMATION_SCHEMA tables. While most other databases refer to this information as a catalog, the official MySQL documentation refers to the INFORMATION_SCHEMA metadata as tables. Like most relational databases, MySQL provides useful metadata about the database itself.
