There are those that are very adamant about letting people know that using INFORMATION_SCHEMA can crash your database. For example, in making changes to many tables at once Baron writes: “querying the INFORMATION_SCHEMA database on MySQL can completely lock a busy server for a long time. It can even crash it. It is very dangerous.” Though Baron is telling the truth here, he left out one extremely important piece of information: you can actually figure out how dangerous your INFORMATION_SCHEMA query will be, ahead of time, using EXPLAIN.