MySQL database schema discovery

[Roy Smith]

What are my options for MySQL schema discovery?  I want to be able to
find all the tables in a database, and discover the names and types of
each column (i.e. the standard schema discovery stuff).

PEP 249 doesn't seem to have any discovery methods.  Nor does MySQLdb
appear to have any non-standard extentions for this.  I could probably
do this with SQLAlchemy, but I'm trying to avoid that because it's so
heavyweight.

Is there anything else I should be considering?