Re: Documenting a DB schema

On Dienstag, 4. März 2008 Shahaf Abileah wrote:
> create table table_with_comments(a int comment 'this is
> column a...');
> (see http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/create-table.html)
> However, Postgres doesn't support the "comment" keyword.  Is there an
> alternative?

This sounds nice at first thought... but: you need to document tables
also, and relations between tables etc. And especially the complex
dependencies can't be documented that way ("if you insert this here,
look into table x and y and compare this with table z, blabla").

And I'd like to know how often such funny documentation can be found
when it's used, take your example:
> create table table_with_comments(a int comment 'this is
> column a...');
I've seen such documentation a lot - just bought a Nokia E65 mobile
phone, it's handbook has this kind of documentation printed in it...
worthless.

But, BTW, does anybody have a good tool to show graphically the
relations between tables, and maybe even draw relations between tables
and create all necessary commands from this automatically? That would
be nice, along with documentation features...

mfg zmi
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