how to extract database metadata

Hi
thank you for reading my post
is there any way that i can extract a database metadata into a .sql file or a posibility to extract the metadata and forward it to another database?
is there any library that make this job easier to do ?
it looks that directly using conn.getMetaData(); will be the hard way.

thanks

Which database are you referring to? If you are in oracle 9i you can try DBMS_METADATA package (GET_XML and GET_DDL). Tools like TOAD supports this pretty good (with depedent objects w/o data).

Oracle is nice in that you can access any user table as a more abstract general table. What kind of meta data do you want though? Try to provide an example of what you are trying to do.

One option is to use a db generation tool that generates your JDBC code based on a one-time review of the database using JDBC getMetaData() calls. This could be time consuming per call but not so much if the code is generated infrequently.