Incoherent Babble

You know a feature I’d really like to see, either natively in MySQL, or inherently through phpMyAdmin (et al)?

The ability to add descriptions to field definitions in a table (ie: field “post_title” would have description “Holds the Post’s Title” - very simplistic example, but you can see how it would scale).

This would help not only document the original developer’s actual intent for what a column should store (particularly since documentation is usually the least favorite thing for developers to do), but also serve as a type of quick reference or keyword reminder so those of us who follow behind you (or just can’t remember what we ourselves intended something to be) can quickly remember without digging out huge sets of documentation (which may or may not exist), and without leaving the environment we’re already established in.

Storing the original create statement, along with any alter statements, and notes on what any why something was done would also be a welcome paper trail for some of us, although on busy systems, those logs could grow quite rapidly. Think about it along the lines of a database-design wiki. You can mark your ALTER statements as “minor edits” or “major edits”, and include a note about what’s being done, why, and by whom. If something horridly blew up, or another developer came along later, you could easily check the reasoning behind the change or quickly roll it back as needed.

It’s all about docoumentation, and with as poor reputations most of us have for keeping up with such menial tasks, you’d think giving everyone a little help would be worth some extra time and database overhead.

Of course it’s quite possible such things already exist (and I know some do in various other database systems), so please let me know if I’ve missed something…