User profile for Dave60103

@David Atkinson I have finally got the code and article together to describe how I extend Redgate SQLDoc to support Hyperlinks in HTML Bulleted lists in Git markdown table cells README.md as the default document rather than index.md README.md in each object folder (Tables.md, Views.md etc get copied to README.md in that folder) Normally I would submit the article through Tony Davis. It has been a long time since I submitted anything so I am not sure if this has changed? / comments

@David Atkinson I have finally got the code and article together to describe how I extend Redgate SQLDoc to support Hyperlinks in HTML Bulleted lists in Git markdown table cells README.md as the d...

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@David Atkinson sorry for the delay. In our case it is primarily the data scientists and the data analysts who need to know what the data structures are supposed to hold. As data governance becomes ever stricter the data compliance folk are taking an increasing interest as well. Every year we get an external data audit and the questions we have to answer get more detailed as time goes on. What data do we have, how can you prove data starting at point A gets to point B and beyond etc. Another problem we are trying to solve is that a development team are not sure what a database column is for and rather than try and find out they simply create another column. We had a case where a web app was failing intermittently and what we found was the practise of bunging another column on the end of a table meant that in some cases the app was attempting to write a record greater the 8060 bytes. / comments

@David Atkinson sorry for the delay.In our case it is primarily the data scientists and the data analysts who need to know what the data structures are supposed to hold.As data governance becomes e...

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Yes, that's it. I would be interested in other people's perspectives on this. My experience has been that as the data estate grows you can no-longer rely on the hive mind of the organisation. COVID-19 has really disrupted the hive as well. / comments

Yes, that's it. I would be interested in other people's perspectives on this. My experience has been that as the data estate grows you can no-longer rely on the hive mind of the organisation. CO...

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https://github.com/AspieArchitect/DataCatalogDoc I've burned a lot of time using Powershell to amend the output of SQLDoc as a post processing step. To quote Edison, I have not failed, I have found 10,000 ways that do not work. An article I hoped to complete months ago is in tatters. The challenge I have is that I like to use different ways of drawing attention to database documentation content so that it is easy to read and useful to the reader. The reader is afterall the most important person. Bulleted lists Numbered lists Hyperlinks to external documents i.e. design documents on Atlassian Confluence, articles on SQLServerCentral or Simple-talk etc. The more connected the content the more useful it is to the reader. The MS_DESCRIPTION property is displayed in SQLDoc, Data Catalog and SQLPrompt as tooltips. Any attempt to use HTML to support this is rebuffed as it converted to html encoded text. I did experiment with using Powershell to modify links stored as Markdown format into html format. Similarly markdown bulleted lists converted into html. If I use markdown bulleted lists for in column descriptions then they show in html and tooltips (albeit with * for bullet) but break markdown output in markdown tables. If I use markdown hyperlink format I can reformat the link so it renders in html output but the tooltips in SQLPrompt become cluttered with markdown. Their clarity is lost. I almost had a solution but not one that was robust enough for my liking. Even using the Atlassian products directly (JIRA, Confluence, BitBucket) you have to be vigilant for things that break text formatting or macros. As MS_DESCRIPTION is effectively free text it is too easy to break the content. I feel that the facility to support lists and hyperlinks in database documentation would be useful for the reasons stated. In order for it to work the rendering of tooltips in SQLPrompt would have to discard any presentation mark up (HTML or MD) or render it somehow. Rendering acceptable content in HTML is simplest. I haven't tried the other supported output formats of SQLDoc. When using markdown format I switched all instances of index.md and references using index.md to readme.md. By default git based repos automatically render readme.md. They don't render index.md. I also found that I had to copy some readme files so that access to any folder in a git based repo would have an appropriate readme. I'm frustratingly close to getting all this working, but I've been frustratingly close for ages. Some of it is due to lockdown burnout. / comments

https://github.com/AspieArchitect/DataCatalogDocI've burned a lot of time using Powershell to amend the output of SQLDoc as a post processing step. To quote Edison, I have not failed, I have found...

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Thanks Roseanna. One possibility is that I put the scripts in my own GitHub repo and let the team pull from it. / comments

Thanks Roseanna. One possibility is that I put the scripts in my own GitHub repo and let the team pull from it.

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Looking forward to it. / comments

Looking forward to it.

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I'm obviously worried about my Dad. He's a fit 81 year old that got told off by his 78 year old girlfriend for climbing apple trees. Knowing him the nature of the telling off would be because she objected to being used as look out while apple scrumping. Still, no-one knows how the virus affects individuals. I miss my eldest two sons, particularly my eldest who lives alone just North of Cambridge and has had to travel through London regularly. My youngest is deemed to have an essential occupation but also has an auto-immune condition. Despite all this I am optimistic as to what the long term will be following COVID-19. For some people working from home for the first time has been a revelation. It would be something they would now ask about in a job interview. Although not for everyone the implications on the number finding that home working works for them is profound. A couple of hours a day NOT commuting No open-plan offices with their distractions Cost of transport significantly reduced Work your own hours. If you can't be measured by your time in the office you have to be measured by your productive output. If I start at 07:00 there is nothing to stop me taking a long lunch break, walking the dog, or myriad other things. Drying the washing on the line (lower electricity bills), snoring the blossom off the trees! If society as a whole has a large proportion of home workers then the benefits for society can also be huge Do companies need big offices in prime locations? To what extent is car design dictated by the need for somewhere comfy to sit for 2+ hours commuting? What does transport infrastructure of the future look like if a large proportion work from home? Does HS2 go the way of HS1? How many roads and bypassed do we need? What does future retail look like? Does the nations dependency on oil go down? Does air quality improve? Does energy demand go down? We could be looking at a revolution in society and with it some painful adjustments in the short to medium term. If the number of urban workers drop then all the businesses that support the urban workers suffer a dramatic drop in demand. I think that universities are going to get all sorts of research material from the comming months. / comments

I'm obviously worried about my Dad. He's a fit 81 year old that got told off by his 78 year old girlfriend for climbing apple trees. Knowing him the nature of the telling off would be because she ...

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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. / comments

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...

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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. / comments

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 refere...

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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. / comments

Another possibility is that where a foreign key relationship exists back to a reference set, hyperlink the column name back to the reference set.

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