Documenting your PostgreSQL database

Re:Documenting your PostgreSQL database by jsnell on Monday July 27, 2015 @05:18AM (#9954167)

Especially when at least right now one of the things being documented in the example as "first name of the user" is the last_name field!

  last_name  | character varying(50)       | ... | required first name of user

That shows two documentation antipatterns, actually. Documentation that conflicts with the code, and documentation so generic that it gets carelessly filled in with copy-paste.

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Re:Documenting your PostgreSQL database by cmdkeen on Monday July 27, 2015 @07:53AM (#9954602)

I work with Oracle these days, or the ... might contain it - but is it not also missing a NOT NULL constraint?

Documentation that conflicts with the DDL makes for an easy code review at least. I look at it more like an interface specification, especially as there are several ways to write DDL - though there should really be a house style. For instance the NOT NULL constraint might be being added later on the script, so it isn't necessarily readable in the same way as normal code.

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