Storing column help text in Oracle's data dictionary

We have recently (June) gotten Oracle. Though I've had some training leading to being one of the CASE administrators (Intro, Forms, CASE), I'm still missing some pieces.

In brief, can I store large amounts of text documentation about columns and tables (call it 'help text') in the dictionary?

To go into more detail, I know there are several system tables (DICT, SYSTEM.CATALOG, COM$, which I'll perhaps wrongly refer to as the Oracle data dictionary) that have Comments or Remarks columns in which to store extended text. These columns are all (?) VARCHAR2(2000).

PROBLEM 1: But I have column and table documentation, or help text, from our old data dictionary which may extend to as many as 100 lines, which, assuming an average line length of 60 characters plus a carriage return, amounts to 6100 characters. Isn't the existing Oracle data dictionary, then, inadequate for storing lengthy comments such as my bulky help text?

PROBLEM 2: A logical place for my help text, I thought, was the CASE Dictionary. But in my initial experimentation with it, I found the maximum length for help text/column comments to be only 132, or 120 when reengineering an existing table. (The '120' comes from the Case Dictionary Reference Guide (v5.1), Vol. 1, p. 6-73.) So the CASE dictionary is also inadequate for storing my help text, isn't it?

PROBLEM 3: I've tested and found that VARCHAR2(2000) fields that make up Comments and Remarks are able to store non-visible characters such as carriage returns. This is necessary to signal subsections within my existing help text for columns. But how do query tools, Forms 4 applications, etc., make use of these non-visible characters, or do they?

Thanks for any help you can provide. And if not help, if I can get some discussion, at least, that may help me know better what my alternatives are.

Steve

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Stephen W. Thompson, U. of PA, Data Administration, 215-898-1236
thompson_at_pobox.upenn.edu -OR- st_at_eniac.seas.upenn.edu
URL: http://www.seas.upenn.edu/~st/st.html