How to get table comments via SQL in Oracle?

Since 10g Oracle doesn't immediately drop tables when we issue a DROP TABLE statement. Instead it renames them like this BIN$IN1vjtqhTEKcWfn9PshHYg==$0 and puts them in the recycle bin. This allows us to recover tables we didn't mean to drop. Find out more.

Tables in the recycle bin are still tables, so they show up in ALL_TABLES and similar views. So if you only want to see comments relating only to live (non-dropped) tables you need to filter by table name:

select * from all_tab_comments
where substr(table_name,1,4) != 'BIN$'
/

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"I can't believe there isn't a flag column so you could do and is_recycled = 0 or something. "

You're right, it would be incredible. So I checked the documentation it turns out Oracle 10g added a column called DROPPED to the USER_/ALL_/DBA_TABLES views.

select tc.* 
from all_tab_comments tc
     join all_tables t
     on tc.owner = t.owner
     and tc.table_name = t.table_name
where t.dropped = 'NO'
/

Check out the documentation. Obviously the need to join to the ALL_TABLES view requires more typing than filtering on the name, so depending on our need it might just be easier to keep the original WHERE clause.