November 11, 2002 at 7:07 pm
I was getting ready to do a program to maintain documentation for tables and columns as extended properties.
The idea was this built in the documentation into the database setup, where people (via tools, web pages, whatever) could easily see it.
It then occurred to me that extended properties suffer from some real limitations, notably they aren't all that easy to query, especially to either full-text index or even query via patterns or such.
And that just maybe it was better to plan on doing this as a separate table(s) for documentation instead of extended properties. I realize that the extended properties are off in a table somewhere, but using an explicit user table would seem to be more straightforward than extended properties.
What am I missing? Is there an advantage to extended properties I am missing?
November 14, 2002 at 8:00 am
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November 14, 2002 at 7:17 pm
I think the "advantage" is that its built in, easy to add a quick note in EM. I think you have to look at what it may cost to build a tool to administer a separate system vs using what is there and living with the limitations.
If you're really doing good/deep docs, I think storing separately might make sense.
Andy
November 15, 2002 at 7:49 am
If you are going with external tools, the separate tables make sense. You could actually carry this through for all your metadata.
For instance, one of the things we deal with where I work is we have warehousing efforts which take information from the mainframe. The mainframe column names are not intuitive, as most aren't. However, we have some users who know the mainframe column names who are suddenly in the position of needing to know what the applicable column names are in SQL Server because they have to do some reporting. Of course, we've taken the unfriendly names and made 'em friendly for those users (the majority) who aren't knee deep in the mainframe world. A couple of the DBAs are working on a metadata app that would tie all this together.
K. Brian Kelley
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K. Brian Kelley
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