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Major Description
I could not find any previous issue about adding comments to Derby.
I found one suggestion about it on the web somewhere but not here in Jira.
DB2 and Oracle seem to have a separate COMMENT ON clause
Eg.
COMMENT ON TABLE EMPLOYEE IS 'Reflects first quarter 2000 reorganization'
COMMENT ON COLUMN mytable.primarykey IS 'Unique ID from Sequence SEQ_MASTER'
MySql on the other hand has a more compact syntax
CREATE TABLE FOO (A COMMENT 'This col is A') COMMENT='And here is the table comment'
I quess SQL standard does not talk about commenting objects like tables columns etc. (Although I am not sure, maybe someone could prove me wrong here).
So I propose we start with syntax like
CREATE TABLE TBL_NAME (<coldefinition> COMMENT 'colcomment' ...) COMMENT ' tablecomment'
Column comment could appear anywhere where Column-level-constraint can and the same would apply for table comment.
View comment could come after the query in view definition.
We would only need to add reserved word COMMENT. (Although it is a common word and most certainly is used by someone as a column or tanle name).
It might be that there is already a spot for comments (or should we say remarks) because the DatabaseMetadata returns a column with that name for every attribute.
It is always empty now.
This feature could take the self-documenting property of derby databases to the next level.
I could code this feature but now I would like to know what people think about this issue in here and since I have not been coding Derby before then perhaps a few pointers would be helpful from someone who knows the soucecode of Derby well.