How do you document your database structure? [closed]

Answer 1

SQL Server has extended properties that can take care of this.

This article describes how do set them up in SQL Sever http://www.developer.com/db/article.php/3677766

MSDN Reference

It can be used in conjunction with RedGate SQL Doc to create a nice Data dictionary.

Answer 2

I use comments attached to tables and column. SchemaSpy is a great tool for generating html documentation files out of your schema, including comments.

Answer 3

At one point I wrote a basic SQL parser that would parse CREATE TABLE statements and strip out specially formatted comments. These were then post-processed into LaTeX source and rendered to PDF. This was inspired by Javadoc and was used to create the documentation for This product. Subsequently a data dictionary feature was built into the warehouse manager and a modified version of the LaTeX generator was used to render the data dictionary from the warehouse manager.

On another project I used Visio - the version that comes with Visual Studio Enterprise Architect will forward engineer a database. The SQL so generated had the table and column comments rendered in comment strings that were fairly straightforward to parse. The tool I wrote generated MIF files that were be included into a spec document built with FrameMaker.

If you have a repository tool such as Powerdesigner you can maintain data models in it and get repository reports out that include the documentation you have entered. If you need deeper integration of your data dictionary with functional specifications (Quite useful for data warehouse systems where the ETL is complex and involves significant computation of derived values) you can still extract the metadata and write a utility to generate something that will integrate the data dictionary into a specification document. This also allows cross-referencing between data dictionary items and other specification documents and generation of indexes that cover the data dictionary definitions and related documentation such as a specification of how something is calculated with examples.

Answer 4

Late one but hopefully useful… Here is a process we used when developing relatively large database (around 100 tables and around 350 objects in total)

• Developers were required to use extended properties to add details to all objects.
• Admins rejected any DDL that didn’t have extended properties
• Third party tool was used to automatically generate visual documentation via command line interface every day. We used ApexSQL Doc and it worked just fine but I also successfully used SQL Doc from Red Gate in other company.

This process ensured that we have all objects documented and document up to date.

The difficult thing though was getting developers to write good comments consistently ;)

Answer 5

We've written a word document that lists the tables, the fields and what everything does. This is backed up by a diagram that shows how everything links/relates to each other. It's a pretty simple document really, just a load of tables with Field Name > Data Type > Purpose

Answer 6

I've recently turned to writing markdown documentation, which includes linking to individual table .sql files (where tables and fields are hopefully intuitively named with plenty of comments).

I keep the individual table schema's in version control, using the following command:

mysqldump --no-data --tab=./tables dbname

The schema for a single table allows you to see comments, indexes, unique keys etc. so is fairly self explanatory (well that is the idea at least).

The master markdown documentation has hyperlinks such as user table peppered throughout, so the reader can easily go to the different tables.