Comments on: Column Comments in MySQL

By: Colleen

Colleen — Sun, 13 Mar 2011 04:18:17 +0000

I would’t put too much stock in this post, it’s waay out of date. My todo list clean out all these old posts but you can see the date on it.

By: Dean

Dean — Sat, 12 Mar 2011 05:35:21 +0000

Hi,

I did what you suggested, but when I do DESCRIBE table_name, the comment is not there!
What is going on? How do I see the comments?

FYI, here is the test column that I created with comment as per your suggestion:
ALTER TABLE compare temp VARCHAR(200) DEFAULT ‘Hello’ COMMENT ‘This is my comment about this column’;

ThanX

By: Tibia chars

Tibia chars — Mon, 10 Jan 2011 21:31:49 +0000

thais

By: Ganhar Dinheiro Online

Ganhar Dinheiro Online — Sun, 09 Jan 2011 05:21:26 +0000

hello escreves temas muito interessantes no teu blogue….

By: Tweets that mention Hot Dorkage -- Topsy.com

Tweets that mention Hot Dorkage -- Topsy.com — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 14:32:04 +0000

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By: admin

admin — Mon, 24 May 2010 23:22:00 +0000

I used to use a method like that as well. However if you have your DDL under version control and you test the db changes on a staging server and only push them out to production when stable, the danger is minimized. I would not recommend anybody just barge out and hack on the database schema on a production server.

By: David

David — Fri, 21 May 2010 15:04:54 +0000

That’s why I don’t use it – changing table definitions in order to document them is too dangerous.

I use a separate table, which I call data_dictionary, with three fields: table_name, column_name, and comment. A simple program (in perl, php, or whatever) uses the “show tables” and “describe table_name” MySQL commands to enumerate the actual database schema and then looks up the comments on the tables and columns. Presto! A self-documenting schema.

By: admin

admin — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 17:35:04 +0000

Hmmm… well it worked on whatever version I was using when I wrote the blog post.

By: Bob Corrick

Bob Corrick — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 15:07:36 +0000

Server version: 5.1.33-enterprise-gpl-advanced-log MySQL Enterprise Server – Advanced Edition (GPL) did not accept CHANGE COLUMN.

I had to use MODIFY TABLE… ALTER COLUMN…

By: admin

admin — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 20:15:14 +0000

I agree this is ludicrous, that’s why so many people didn’t do it, or didn’t update them. But surely no one would just bash something like that directly into a production database. It would always be good to test on a copy and also put it under version control. There may be a better way now–his post is kinda old and based on MySQL 4.1 I think. And anyway a lot more people generate their SQL create table statements with automatic tools these days. So perhaps commenting the YAML would work as well or better.