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Best Practices for MySQL Table Documentation
This question is intended to be open ended, and references to online or published manuals are very welcome. What are the best practices for MySQL documentation?
In other words, if I create a table with a field named `foo` and a type of varchar(32) I have not provided very much information, but it I have some documentation that identifies `foo` as the city field of the client's mailing address, normalized against the US Postal Service names for American cities, then I have a much clearer picture of what you could expect to find in `foo`.
Where do programmers and DBAs keep this kind of information? Is there something analogous to a DocBlock to describe columns and table relationships? Is there some way to keep the descriptive information in the data base itself? What are the questions I am forgetting to ask?
TIA, ~Ray
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by: nemws1Posted on 2009-09-15 at 09:22:59ID: 25336584
Using a field name that self-documents, like, "client_mailing_addr" is a *very* good idea. ;-) Most IDEs & text editors will help you with the extra typing (by filling it in for you). In the beginning, its a little extra work, but pays out hugely in the long run.
Industry-wise, it is typical to require an ERD (Entity-Relationship Diagram) as a part of your database design and documentation. Many folks use Microsoft Visio to create these, which works very nicely.
I'm a fan of SQL Editor for the Mac: http://www.malcolmhardie.c
You can actually just point it to your MySQL database and it will mainly build the diagram for you. You can then add notes for things that are non-obvious. I'm attaching an example ERD diagram from a recent project I worked on (okay, it was for part of my Master's thesis project :).
Entity-Relationship Diagram for a MySQL database