Another wonderful Oracle Trick for Oracle Newbies from freakinname:

It seems there are three ways to start grabbing table names (as well as columns in the table, etc) from Oracle.

select distinct table_name from user_tab_columns where table_name like '%' order by table_name
select distinct table_name from DBA_TAB_COLUMNS where table_name like '%' order by table_name
select distinct table_name from ALL_TAB_COLUMNS where table_name like '%' order by table_name

user_tab_columns naturally limits to the user, etc. DBA & ALL are giving me supersets of that so far, and seem to have the same tables in them as each other right now. Tables in ALL that aren't in USER are things like:

ALL$OLAP1_CUBES
ALL$OLAP2UCATALOGS
ALL$OLAP2UCATALOG_ENTITY_USES
ALL$OLAP2UCUBES
ALL$OLAP2UCUBE_DIM_USES

eht-see eht-see.

Anyhow, using these tables in Oracle does the same thing you can do with the master database in SQL Server when you'd like to programmatically get to column names.