The SHOW STATUS command shows server status variables in a two-column name-value table. Unlike the server variables we mentioned in the previous section, these are read-only. You can view the variables by either executing SHOW STATUS as a SQL command or executing mysqladmin extended-status as a shell command. If you use the SQL command, you can use LIKE and WHERE to limit the results; the LIKE does a standard pattern match on the variable name. The commands return a table of results, but you can’t sort it, join it to other tables, or do other standard things you can do with MySQL tables. In MySQL 5.1 and newer, you can select values directly from the INFORMATION_SCHEMA.GLOBAL_STATUS and INFORMATION_SCHEMA.SESSION_STATUS tables.