Open any book or article about database development and administration, and I can all but guarantee that you will find a section for database documentation that describes its importance, best practices, conventions, etc. Why is this? How come so much attention is given to an aspect of databases that, at first sight, has nothing to do with their functionality? Those sections in books and articles, provide dozens of arguments in favor of the importance of database documentation, almost too much to remember. However, most of the reasons boil down to the following:
- An environment that is less complex.
- Lower likelihood of errors
- Databases that are easy to maintain and troubleshoot
- Low training cost for new staff
- Higher productivity
Choose the objects in those databases that you want documented:
And then press 'GO'. xSQL Documenter will read each object's type, descriptions (in the case of SQL Server it will read the MS_Description field), relationships with other database objects, and just about any other information it can find about the object. Then, it will use all the information gathered to build the help files. These help files will be saved by default in an 'output' folder on the same location as xSQLDocumenter.exe and will have the following format:
Below is the detailed view of the documentation for the Employee table.
First it displays a description and data for all the columns, these data include the column's data type, default value, whether it is nullable or not, a description, etc. Further down, you can also see details about the indexes and a list of all the objects that reference the Employee table and object which this table references.
At the end of the page you can see a chart showing the relations among objects. Keep in mind that all objects above the Employee table in the chart are objects that are referenced by this table and all objects below it are objects that reference this table. Besides this chart you also see detailed information about all the constraints and foreign keys for the Employee table.
As demonstrated, with just a few clicks you can generate a full and comprehensive help material that will display info about every database object you want and the relationships between these objects. And, if one has the good sense to provide a description for objects during creation, xSQL Documenter will display that description, making it that much easier to understand the role and function of the object. If this documentation is not to be uploaded in an intranet to be viewed using a browser you can use the .chm file which is indexed and searchable. This makes finding information about a particular object even easier.
This tutorial shows only the tip of the iceberg regarding the capabilities and the information that xSQL Documenter is able to display. For a full reference to this capabilities you can view xSQL Documenter's online help.
