Press "Enter" to skip to content

Extended Properties

Phil Factor has a detailed article on extended properties:

Extended properties are easy to read, thanks to a useful system view. Sys.extended_properties. However, they are a pain to create, update and delete; they rely on special stored procedures that have a syntax that isn’t at all intuitive for those of us without mutant mental powers. They have a limit of 7,500 characters but are actually stored in a SQL_variant so that DateTime, Approximate numeric, exact numeric, character, Unicode and binary information can be stored in it. Most of us use some sort of tool such as SSMS to maintain this documentation rather than to do it via SQL. The SQL is cumbersome.

Extended properties was an interesting idea but there was so little tooling available to make them really useful.  I don’t see that changing.