Re: Thoughts on comments
From: Norman Cobley <nc5_at_sanger.ac.uk>
Date: Fri, 22 Mar 2013 07:00:51 +0000
Message-ID: <514C01A3.5040906_at_sanger.ac.uk>
On 22/03/2013 04:25, z b wrote:
> Listers,
>
> Just wanted to get a general opinion on using comments in the
> database. For example COMMENT ON COLUMN table.column "No comment".
>
> Does anyone do this as a regular best practice? I would prefer to see
> this abstraction in a data model, maybe not pushed to the database
> layer, especially since not all RDBMS engines have "comment"
> functionality.
>
> The thought is we should do this for every column, every table, every
> oracle db. This ends up being several million comments added to the
> our various instances.
> --
> http://www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l
>
>
>
I have used this in the past to derive documentation, the advantage being that if you can enforce/persuade the development team to add comments at table creation time, your documentation can be as low maintenance as simply running the script which pulls the table metadata including comments and dumping into a wiki or some such. Faced with masses of similarly named tables each with cryptically named columns which made sense to a developer that left five years ago ..... it can be a useful resource ;+)
Date: Fri, 22 Mar 2013 07:00:51 +0000
Message-ID: <514C01A3.5040906_at_sanger.ac.uk>
On 22/03/2013 04:25, z b wrote:
> Listers,
>
> Just wanted to get a general opinion on using comments in the
> database. For example COMMENT ON COLUMN table.column "No comment".
>
> Does anyone do this as a regular best practice? I would prefer to see
> this abstraction in a data model, maybe not pushed to the database
> layer, especially since not all RDBMS engines have "comment"
> functionality.
>
> The thought is we should do this for every column, every table, every
> oracle db. This ends up being several million comments added to the
> our various instances.
> --
> http://www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l
>
>
>
I have used this in the past to derive documentation, the advantage being that if you can enforce/persuade the development team to add comments at table creation time, your documentation can be as low maintenance as simply running the script which pulls the table metadata including comments and dumping into a wiki or some such. Faced with masses of similarly named tables each with cryptically named columns which made sense to a developer that left five years ago ..... it can be a useful resource ;+)
atb,
Norman
-- The Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute is operated by Genome Research Limited, a charity registered in England with number 1021457 and a company registered in England with number 2742969, whose registered office is 215 Euston Road, London, NW1 2BE. -- http://www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-lReceived on Fri Mar 22 2013 - 08:00:51 CET