August 8, 2002 at 7:50 am
Just curious if anyone is fully utilizing SQL2000's extended property
capabilities? If so, how are you exploiting it? As a data dictionary?
Inline versioning?
Thanks in advance.
Be great!
Michael
August 24, 2002 at 6:30 am
I have the same interest. We have a data warehouse that has an ever growing number of tables. Our power users rely on documentation in Word to find things (and SP_HELP and helpfully good naming conventions)
I've been considering migrating all that tabular documentation into extended properties on the tables and columns, then provide web pages for users to view it. Scripting the documentation will be a bit of a pain, but potentially can be automated by exporting the current Word tables to something readable.
The only downside I see of this is graphic data doesn't fit well in this scheme, only words.
Has someone tried this? How well did developers take to maintaining it thusly? How did users like it?
August 26, 2002 at 7:22 am
On my last assignment the db docs were in Excel and I got so tired correcting the mistakes I ended up putting the descriptions into extended properties. I wrote an sp that extracted the descriptions as well as other major schema information, and an asp page to present it. Client liked it, though my assignment ended a month ago so I don't know if they've kept it up.
I've been meaning to do an article on it for this forum rsn ;-).
What I like about this method of documenting is you're getting the the information directly from the db itself. So if that column changes from an integer to a float you don't have to worry about updating a Word or Excel document.
Viewing 3 posts - 1 through 2 (of 2 total)
You must be logged in to reply to this topic. Login to reply