Question

Suppose I have a big database, about 800 tables. In this database there is a table that serves as a metatable describing all of the fields of the other tables in the database, for documentation purposes. This table is read by a self written tool of the company I work at.

I’m new at the company and I’m rather inexperienced, so please forgive me for asking this…

In SSMS 2008 R2 I want to make an entity relationship diagram, which seems possible, which is great. I also see that it is possible to show a description for each field in the diagram, without clicking on a table/entity first to show the descriptions. Is there any way to automatically insert the relavant data of the previous mentioned “metatable” into the description/note entry of each field of the corresponding table shapes in the diagram? I could do it manually but I thought I better ask here before I do anything stupid (lot of work). I thought about SQL Procedures, but the thing I am trying to do involves the description fields of the diagram editor itsself, so I don’t think that is covered with Transact SQL.

BTW, if somebody knows how to set/show the cardinality of the relationships in the diagramm please tell me.

By the way, we (the company) have Visio 2007 too (not that it would solve any of the problems..), but I’d like to use SSMS 2008 R2 first to set foreign keys (which are not there) and then import that into Visio through the reverse engineering option. Seems more logical for me, instead of using Visio in the first step. Of course I’m using a backup of our database.

Answer 1

The diagram description is not a property of the diagram it is a property of the table itself.

See sp_addextendedproperty in SQL Server books online:

• http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms180047.aspx

You need to add an extended property with the name 'MS_Description'.

For a useful extended description, see here:

• http://www.simple-talk.com/sql/sql-tools/towards-the-self-documenting-sql-server-database/