Brent Ozar makes use of extended properties:
You can add database instructions as extended properties at the database or object level, and when Copilot works with those objects, it’ll read your instructions and use them to shape its advice.
For example, you can add a database-level property called a “constitution” with your company’s coding standards, like this:
Andy Brownsword has another example:
The new Database Instructions are text stored against database objects to add more context about the object and how it should be used. A simple example:
We find a Sales table with a
Pricecolumn. Is that the price for a single unit or the line total? Does that include or exclude VAT? What about discounts?This is where context is king, and Database Instructions allow us to annotate these details and remove the ambiguity.
Database properties are a criminally underused part of SQL Server—in part because there wasn’t great tooling around how to display or work with these properties—and if this forces people to be a bit thoughtful in design and after-the-fact documentation on database objects, so much the better.