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dbdesc, $79.95 dbdesc provides an inexpensive way to document the structure of your SQL Server (2000 or 2005), Access, or Firebird databases. Not surprisingly, it also works with MSDE and SQL Server Express. The process is simplicity itself: select the server and database, select the objects, and select the output format. In the final step, you have the choice of dbdesc's own built-in reporting engine or XML output with and XSLT transform for presentation. There are supplied XSLT files for HTML, Word, and RTF presentation, and of course you can make up your own. dbdesc is quite fast at extracting the essential information from SQL Server databases (the only type I tested with) and its presentation of the information is clean and easy to follow. But there's more here than just a documentation utility to run from the user interface: the GUI is a wrapper around a command-line version with an interface that gives you access to all of the dbdesc options. This means that you can automate all of dbdesc's operations in a lights-out fashion if you need to. The obvious use is to create database documentation as part of a build process, but I can think of other ways to use this little engine as well. If you brainstorm a bit, you'll see that dbdesc gives you a way to get SQL Server (or Access or Firebird) schemas wholly or partially into XML files. So I could see using dbdesc as a schema-extraction tool that then hands the XML off to some other piece of a larger build process as well. The downloadable version on the Web site is full-featured, but inserts some extra text in the output to remind you to register.
Mike Gunderloy is the lead developer for Larkware and author of numerous books and articles on programming topics. Published May 8, 2006 |
