The following patch extends the COMMENT ON functionality to the
rest of the database objects beyond just tables, columns, and views. The
grammer of the COMMENT ON statement now looks like:
COMMENT ON [
[ DATABASE | INDEX | RULE | SEQUENCE | TABLE | TYPE | VIEW ] <objname>
|
COLUMN <relation>.<attribute> |
AGGREGATE <aggname> <aggtype> |
FUNCTION <funcname> (arg1, arg2, ...) |
OPERATOR <op> (leftoperand_typ rightoperand_typ) |
TRIGGER <triggername> ON relname>
Mike Mascari
(mascarim@yahoo.com)
>From the ORACLE 7 SQL Language Reference Manual:
-----------------------------------------------------
COMMENT
Purpose:
To add a comment about a table, view, snapshot, or
column into the data dictionary.
Prerequisites:
The table, view, or snapshot must be in your own
schema
or you must have COMMENT ANY TABLE system privilege.
Syntax:
COMMENT ON [ TABLE table ] |
[ COLUMN table.column] IS 'text'
You can effectively drop a comment from the database
by setting it to the empty string ''.
-----------------------------------------------------
Example:
COMMENT ON TABLE workorders IS
'Maintains base records for workorder information';
COMMENT ON COLUMN workorders.hours IS
'Number of hours the engineer worked on the task';
to drop a comment:
COMMENT ON COLUMN workorders.hours IS '';
The current patch will simply perform the insert into
pg_description, as per the TODO. And, of course, when
the table is dropped, any comments relating to it
or any of its attributes are also dropped. I haven't
looked at the ODBC source yet, but I do know from
an ODBC client standpoint that the standard does
support the notion of table and column comments.
Hopefully the ODBC driver is already fetching these
values from pg_description, but if not, it should be
trivial.
Hope this makes the grade,
Mike Mascari
(mascarim@yahoo.com)