Re: tools for developing a "data dictionary"?
Your "usability specialist" is a moron. What she wants to do is what you
think she wants to do: create a glossary. It is not a "data dictionary", and
certainly is not "meta-data".
Bill: Sorry, this list currently has no openings for "curmudgeons." We're full up - you'll have to wait until one of our resident curmudgeons retires.
Yeah, this particular usability specialist sounds a little, uh, "lightly informed." But the request is not unreasonable - to crank out a list of all the data items and provide some basic description of them. Even if you call it a glossary.
There are tools you can point at your database to create a basic outline (i.e., glossary entries) . Some of the tools will even produce a full outline for a data dictionary. ERwin comes to mind, although I haven't used it for a while (Lord knows who owns it now). Of course, you'll still have to write the descriptions - that's the hard part.
You could do a lot worse than to point ERwin at your database and let it generate its "data dictionary" report.
Mike O.
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