Oracle: COMMENT ON ...

A little known / little used feature of Oracle is the COMMENT ON TABLE / COMMENT ON COLUMN facility. Basically this allows each table and column to have a descriptive text applied to it. It is common to have descriptive text for both tables and columns contained within your application schema, or in a separate data dictionary type document, but it would be nice for that information to be available via external tools that access and / or modify the database without referring to separate documentation.

The feature is used in the following way:

COMMENT ON TABLE mytable IS ‘This is my Master Table’

COMMENT ON COLUMN mytable.primarykey IS ‘Unique ID from Sequence SEQ_MASTER’

The comments can be displayed by querying the following views:

DBA_TAB_COMMENTS
DBA_COL_COMMENTS
ALL_TAB_COMMENTS
ALL_COL_COMMENTS
USER_TAB_COMMENTS
USER_COL_COMMENTS

If you have a schema within your application that contains comments on both the table and column levels it should be very straightforward to write a small program to loop through your schema data and write those comments into Oracle. It could be a couple of hours well spent.

"The excellence of a gift lies in its appropriateness rather than in its value." - Charles Dudley Warner