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copied!<p>At one point I wrote a basic SQL parser that would parse CREATE TABLE statements and strip out specially formatted comments. These were then post-processed into LaTeX source and rendered to PDF. This was inspired by <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Javadoc" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Javadoc</a> and was used to create the documentation for <a href="http://www.niit-tech.com/industries/insurance/property-and-casualty/solutions/acumen-advantage" rel="nofollow noreferrer">This product</a>. Subsequently a data dictionary feature was built into the warehouse manager and a modified version of the LaTeX generator was used to render the data dictionary from the warehouse manager.</p> <p>On another project I used Visio - the version that comes with Visual Studio Enterprise Architect will forward engineer a database. The SQL so generated had the table and column comments rendered in comment strings that were fairly straightforward to parse. The tool I wrote generated MIF files that were be included into a spec document built with FrameMaker.</p> <p>If you have a repository tool such as <a href="http://www.sybase.com/products/modelingmetadata/powerdesigner" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Powerdesigner</a> you can maintain data models in it and get repository reports out that include the documentation you have entered. If you need deeper integration of your data dictionary with functional specifications (Quite useful for data warehouse systems where the ETL is complex and involves significant computation of derived values) you can still extract the metadata and write a utility to generate something that will integrate the data dictionary into a specification document. This also allows cross-referencing between data dictionary items and other specification documents and generation of indexes that cover the data dictionary definitions and related documentation such as a specification of how something is calculated with examples.</p>

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