I have an sql table with multiple fields and 4 of them are enums. I wrote a script that runs thought the table and retrieve the enums and put them in a 2 dimension array.Unfortunately this script is extreamly slow and I can't fix it. <?phprequire_once('mySQL_Connect.php');$con = ConnectToDataBase();if ($con == false){    //data returned will be null    exit;}$db = 'courses_db';$table = 'courses';$fields = array('training_field','speciality_field','type','language');$enums = array();foreach ($fields as $colomn) {$sq1 = SELECT             column_type         FROM             information_schema.columns         WHERE             table_schema = '$db'         AND             table_name = '$table'        AND             column_name = '$colomn';$query =  mysqli_query($con,$sq1);$stack = array();   $i = 0;$stack[$i]=$colomn;if ($fetch = mysqli_fetch_assoc($query) ){    $enum = $fetch['column_type'];    $off = strpos($enum,();    $enum = substr($enum, $off+1, strlen($enum)-$off-2);    $values = explode(,,$enum);    // For each value in the array, remove the leading and trailing    // single quotes, convert two single quotes to one. Put the result    // back in the array in the same form as CodeCharge needs.    for( $n = 0; $n < Count($values); $n++) {    $val = substr( $values[$n], 1,strlen($values[$n])-2);    $val = str_replace('',',$val);    $stack[$i+1]=$val;    $i++;    }}    // return the values array to the caller    //echo json_encode( $stack);    array_push($enums,$stack);    reset($stack);}echo json_encode($enums);?> 
php script to retrieve enum values from sql table
php;performance;mysql;sql
I finally found a solution and here it is:function get_enum_values($connection, $table, $field ){    $query =  SHOW COLUMNS FROM `$table` LIKE '$field' ;    $result = mysqli_query($connection, $query );    $row = mysqli_fetch_array($result , MYSQL_NUM );    #extract the values    #the values are enclosed in single quotes    #and separated by commas    $regex = /'(.*?)'/;    preg_match_all( $regex , $row[1], $enum_array );    $enum_fields = $enum_array[1];    return( $enum_fields );}So basically there's no need to go through information_schema!Credit goes to this blog:http://akinas.com/pages/en/blog/mysql_enum/Hope this helps out some people.