SHOW COLUMNS and DESCRIBE can display information about the columns in individual INFORMATION_SCHEMA tables. : SHOW « MySQL Utilities « MySQL Tutorial

Several SHOW statements have been extended to allow a WHERE clause:

1. SHOW CHARACTER SET
2. SHOW COLLATION
3. SHOW COLUMNS
4. SHOW DATABASES
5. SHOW FUNCTION STATUS
6. SHOW KEYS
7. SHOW OPEN TABLES
8. SHOW PROCEDURE STATUS
9. SHOW STATUS
10. SHOW TABLE STATUS
11. SHOW TABLES
12. SHOW VARIABLES

The WHERE clause is evaluated against the column names displayed by the SHOW statement.

SHOW CHARACTER SET;

SHOW CHARACTER SET WHERE `Default collation` LIKE '%japanese%';

This statement displays the multi-byte character sets:

SHOW CHARACTER SET WHERE Maxlen > 1;