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Another possibility is that where a foreign key relationship exists back to a reference set, hyperlink the column name back to the reference set. -
How about markdown instead of HTML?
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It works up to a point. Markdown is great for developers publishing documentation to GitHub or similar but less so for general business users.
Also, I use bullet points for documenting small reference sets and these tend to break markdown in tables. -
I have implemented a way of supplying boiler plate column descriptions for publication using SQLDoc. I've written part of it up as Reoiling the gears for the data dictionary.
I think it would be a useful feature of the SQLDoc product to be able to apply templated descriptions to columns that are common across the DB.
Half the battle is getting people to attach comments in the first place. Anything that makes it easy to do so is one more barrier knocked down. -
Thank you for sharing your feedback and article, @Dave60103. I will pass this onto our development team. Best wishes, Roseanna
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I have hit a slight hiccup in that SQLDoc encodes HTML tags rather than renders them. I understand why it would do that (cross site scripting, breaking the rendering etc.
I would like the option to turn off the encoding of HTML tags because some of the things I include in my documentation are hyperlinks to external knowledge bases. To give examples
- A column that represents ISO3166 country codes would be hyperlinked to a suitable web page
- A column using a commonly used term in the organisation would link to the company intranet defining that term.
- A column that references another will hyperlink to the table referenced by that column. For example DateKey within a fact table will hyperlink back to DimDate.
Similarly I use bulleted lists to make the descriptions clearer. For small reference data sets I may even render the contents as a bulleted list. The goal is to make the descriptions as informative as possible.