[ciapug] Database documentation

[Tony Bibbs]

You could have DBDesigner reverse engineer it for you.  Then using it 
you can add comments.  All that stuff is in XML and I believe there are 
trasnforms freely available to generate Word documents out of that stuff 
into a data dictionary.  Given that the MySQL Workbench is authored, I 
think, by the DBDesigner developer(s) that tool may also provide similar 
features (and supported better).  It too stores the stuff in XML so if 
there aren't any transforms out there, it couldn't be too hard to build 
one yourself or just use the improved PHP5 XML to code a solution.

--Tony

Dave J. Hala Jr. wrote:
> I'm looking and I find a reference to an INFORMATION_SCHEMA db in Mysql
> 5. That db contains a table called "tables" that has a comment field
> that describes each field.
> 
> I don't see this in  4.1.  However, there's nothing stoping me from 
> creating something similiar, and then just doing a join with this table
> when looking up the "schema"  However, custom code like that generally
> gets me in trouble later on.
> 
> I'll have to kick the idea around some more.
> 
> :) Dave