SQL Server DB documentation from schema

Mon, 11 May 2009 20:54:00 --0100

I am in the (fun!) process of documenting an application I created nearly 5 years ago, in which the majority of the functionality is controlled by the database (it's a business workflow automation tool). Reverse engineering substantially reduces the size of the task - Visio's Database > Reverse Engineer... command is a real time saver when you have foreign key constraints defined, makes generation of an ERD no more complicated than arranging all the boxes so that none (or few!) of the relationship lines cross! A little utility contributed to the Code Project website makes the process of creating table and field documentation much easier: http://www.codeproject.com/KB/database/sqldoc.aspx This utility can be pointed at a SQL server database, and will generate an HTML document listing all the tables and fields in the database, together with data types, nullable, default values and description fields from the db schema. It uses an XSLT transformation to convert the xml generated to an HTML document. This can be edited so that it's closer to final requirements - I have updated the XSLT to place anchors on each table name, and links at the top of the file to each table. This makes it a much less arduous task to document each table and field - I can edit the file in dreamweaver and just add descriptions for each field and table.

- Documentation

SQL Server DB documentation from schema