List of tables, db schema, dump etc using the Python sqlite3 API

You can fetch the list of tables and schemata by querying the SQLITE_MASTER table:

sqlite> .tab
job         snmptarget  t1          t2          t3        
sqlite> select name from sqlite_master where type = 'table';
job
t1
t2
snmptarget
t3

sqlite> .schema job
CREATE TABLE job (
    id INTEGER PRIMARY KEY,
    data VARCHAR
);
sqlite> select sql from sqlite_master where type = 'table' and name = 'job';
CREATE TABLE job (
    id INTEGER PRIMARY KEY,
    data VARCHAR
)

I'm not familiar with the Python API but you can always use

SELECT * FROM sqlite_master;

If someone wants to do the same thing with Pandas

import pandas as pd
import sqlite3
conn = sqlite3.connect("db.sqlite3")
table = pd.read_sql_query("SELECT name FROM sqlite_master WHERE type='table'", conn)
print(table)

Apparently the version of sqlite3 included in Python 2.6 has this ability: http://docs.python.org/dev/library/sqlite3.html

# Convert file existing_db.db to SQL dump file dump.sql
import sqlite3, os

con = sqlite3.connect('existing_db.db')
with open('dump.sql', 'w') as f:
    for line in con.iterdump():
        f.write('%s\n' % line)

Some might find my function useful if you just want to print out all of the tables and columns in your db.

In the loop, I query each TABLE with LIMIT 0 so it just returns the header info without all the data. You make an empty df out of it, and use the iterable df.columns to print each column name out.

conn = sqlite3.connect('example.db')
c = conn.cursor()

def table_info(c, conn):
    '''
    prints out all of the columns of every table in db
    c : cursor object
    conn : database connection object
    '''
    tables = c.execute("SELECT name FROM sqlite_master WHERE type='table';").fetchall()
    for table_name in tables:
        table_name = table_name[0] # tables is a list of single item tuples
        table = pd.read_sql_query("SELECT * from {} LIMIT 0".format(table_name), conn)
        print(table_name)
        for col in table.columns:
            print('\t' + col)
        print()

table_info(c, conn)

Results will be:

table1
    column1
    column2

table2
    column1
    column2
    column3 

etc.

Check out here for dump. It seems there is a dump function in the library sqlite3.