MySQL - Commenting table fields

Anon

Hi,

How would I add a comment to a table structure (on some/all fields) in MySQL? DBs like access can have comments attached to a table and it's a feature I would really appreciate in MySQL. Afaik, MySQL doesn't offer such a feature (maybe it's non SQL92 compliant), so what would be a good solution?

Anon

I am working in the E-commerd

Gildas wrote:

Hi,

Anon

I searched the sql92 draft at ftp.postgresql.org/pub/docs/sql/ and could find nothing about embedded comments stored with table definitions.

You can of course maintain your create scripts (with comments) in a source control repository and have your comments there.

If you truely need comments on your fields, you should redesign your database to have more descriptive table and column names.

Tom

Anon

Yes, I meant: comments in table descriptions are not SQL92 compliant. I know MySQL tries to follow the SQL92 rules as close as possible, but this would be a nice feature I find.

Yet I try to make table and field names rather descriptive but a real comment space should be better, IMO. I thought of keeping comments in a special table but it's not easy to get all that stuff up-to-date.

Anon

I can't see a reason why you'd need comments built into the database then. If what you really need is a datamap, check out sybase.com for powerdesigner. There is a 30 day free copy you can get that will reverse engineer your database (works fine w/ mysql through odbc) and create a nice diagram which you can then comment.

Anon

For the same reason I put comments in my program source code. I find more reason to put comments directly tied to the object structure (tables/database in this case, program source in the latter) than in any other document or config file (and IDE project file for instance).

If find using MySQL with another IDE + some ODBC link doesn't provide a better solution in this case: what if the DB structure changes, say I rename a field for instance? I loose the link between the field and the added comment within the IDE...

Well, I really see reasons for having comments tied to the DB structure, but maybe I'm alone... 🙂