I googled and found a number of tools that claim to document MySQL
schema, both at the column level and the table level.

If you have found any that worked well for you please let me know.

Thanks,
Joe

On 2011-07-20 22:38, Joseph Hesse wrote:
http://schemaspy.sourceforge.net/


/Lennart

On 07/22/2011 01:33 AM, Lennart Jonsson wrote:
I didn't do a good job of explaining what I am looking for. I am using
MySQL Workbench and it does an excellent job of creating a graphical
representation of all the tables and their columns in a DB. What I
would like is next to a picture of a table a place to put comments, both
for my memory and for explaining it to a client. On my wishlist I would
like everything in the graphical representation to be a link to more
details.

On 7/20/2011 1:38 PM, Joseph Hesse wrote:
DESCRIBE tablename;

or, more usefully,

SHOW CREATE TABLE tablename;

On 2011-07-23 17:12, Joseph Hesse wrote:
[...]
Have you tried adding comments to your tables/columns?

/Lennart

Joseph Hesse wrote:

Indeed. MySQL Workbench was among the things that I would have recommended
to you.

A good database is self-documenting ;-)

Seriously, I have never had that problem. MySQL Workbench allows you to put
tables on a named layer, and that, in addition to reasonably named tables
and columns sufficed for me to date. See for example
<http://PointedEars.de/tmp/rdm.png> (from an ontology editor project).

However, the recent versions MySQL Workbench (e. g., 5.2.29) also allow you
to put arbitrary text and images in your EER diagram, and you can add
comments to schemata, tables, and columns both with MySQL workbench and
phpMyAdmin, which is pretty much a standard tool by now (and since version
2.10 has a graphical editor per the "Designer" tab as well).

So I don't see the problem. (Besides, never has a client asked me for an
EER diagram of the database of the application I was developing. They just
wanted it to work.)

--
PointedEars

Bitte keine Kopien per E-Mail. / Please do not Cc: me.

Thomas 'PointedEars' Lahn wrote:

Supplemental: Adding comments to tables and columns is a built-in MySQL
feature (see the COMMENT keyword of the CREATE TABLE and ALTER TABLE
statements, apparently hard to find thanks to Oracle's borken indexing), but
adding comments to databases appears to be not. phpMyAdmin stores database
comments in fields of the column `phpmyadmin`.`pma_column_info`.`comment`.

--
PointedEars

Bitte keine Kopien per E-Mail. / Please do not Cc: me.

On 7/24/2011 3:31 AM, Thomas 'PointedEars' Lahn wrote:
Comments on columns and tables has been part of the SQL standard for
over 20 years.

And who cares how PHPMyAdmin does it?

--
==================
Remove the "x" from my email address
Jerry Stuckle
JDS Computer Training Corp.
jstucklex (AT) attglobal (DOT) net
==================

On 7/23/2011 4:32 PM, Thomas 'PointedEars' Lahn wrote:
I've had to do many diagrams over the years. But then when you have a
project with a couple of hundred programmers working on it, good
documentation is necessary.

But when you're just hacking a bunch of code together to try to
(eventually) make a website work, then generally clients don't ask for
diagrams.
--
==================
Remove the "x" from my email address
Jerry Stuckle
JDS Computer Training Corp.
jstucklex (AT) attglobal (DOT) net
==================

Jerry Stuckle wrote:

Generally good to know, but who cares about "the SQL standard" (there are
several) when we are discussing MySQL? You really had nothing to say but
just wanted to post something, yes?

The OP, who was wondering which of the claims were true. If only you
learned to read …

--
PointedEars

Bitte keine Kopien per E-Mail. / Please do not Cc: me.