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Zar Shardan
Starting Member
5 Posts |
 Posted - 2012-03-20 : 17:02:41
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| There are quite a few tools on the market that can generate a "data dictionary" - a document describing you DB's structure.Good examples are Elsasoft SqlSpec, ApexSQL Doc and RedGate SQLDoc.However all these tools are documentation generators, so before you can start using the docs - you need to generate them. Also their output is read-only - there is no point in editing it - changes would be lost once the docs are re-generated. Usually you can't justify installing such software on every developer's and DBA's PC mainly due to the licensing costs - It's just not worth it.So I decided to approach this problem form a slightly different angle.I wrote an IIS Intranet Web App (LiveDoco) that can be installed somewhere on the Intranet or even on a dev/DBA's PC and would provide a MSDN+Wiki style access to your SQL Server database's metadata/structure. It visually resembles MSDN - object tree on the left-hand side panel, folding sections in the main docs area, heavily hyper-linked. Wiki because all the notes/descriptions are easily editable. In fact even easier than in Wiki. There is also a flexible search facility that allows to search object names and their descriptions. Now because this tool has access to the structured metadata it can be restricted only to table column names or their descriptions for example. Something that is not possible in the CHM or Word document's case.LiveDoco supports deep linking - so you can send emails with links to DB objects to your colleagues (if they have network access to the LiveDoco server, of course - which is normally the case on the corporate intranet).Please see this link: http://www.livedoco.com/why-livedoco where I explain how LiveDoco is different from Documentation Generators.Online demo here: www.livedoco.com/online-demo I'd like you to share your thoughts on this - is there a market for such tools, any comments/notes? Any suggestions? Missing features, pricing adequate or not?www.livedoco.com - View your SQL Server structure in your browser. Live. |
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Browser based database structure explorer/doc tool