Adding a Column Description

adding a column description

I'd say you will probably want to do it using the sp_addextendedproperty stored proc.

Microsoft has some good documentation on it.

Try this:

EXEC sp_addextendedproperty 
    @name = N'MS_Description', @value = 'Hey, here is my description!',
    @level0type = N'Schema',   @level0name = 'yourschema',
    @level1type = N'Table',    @level1name = 'YourTable',
    @level2type = N'Column',   @level2name = 'yourColumn';
GO

How to add column description in CREATE TABLE DDL

According to the documentation this should work:

CREATE TABLE mydataset.newtable (
  x STRING(10)     OPTIONS(description="denotes value of x"),
  y STRING(10)     OPTIONS(description="denotes value of y"),
  z BIGNUMERIC(35) OPTIONS(description="denotes value of z")
)

Is it possible to add description for column while creating table in MSSQL QUERY

It's clunky in SQL Server. For some reason, they've never adopted the COMMENT syntax, and you can't add the comments directly in the CREATE TABLE statement.

After your CREATE statement, run the system stored procedure sp-addextendedproperty

There's an extended conversation on the topic under this question: SQL Comments on Create Table on SQL Server 2008

add column descriptions in dbt docs

The canonical way to do this is with the codegen package, which generates the files exactly as you have described.

Python Dataframe Adding a description to column

A comment on pandas-dev/pandas#2485 suggests using _metadata and .attrs. See https://pandas.pydata.org/pandas-docs/stable/development/extending.html#define-original-properties for more information.

One way to do this is to subclass pandas.DataFrame and add _metadata.

Define _metadata for normal properties which will be passed to manipulation results.

import pandas as pd

class SubclassedDataFrame(pd.DataFrame):

    # normal properties
    _metadata = ['description']

    @property
    def _constructor(self):
        return SubclassedDataFrame

data = {"a": [1, 2, 3], "b": [10, 12, 13]}

df = SubclassedDataFrame(data)

df.description = "About my data"

Setting _metadata in the subclass indicates that these properties should be propagated after manipulation. See the example using .head() below for a demonstration of the difference between pd.DataFrame and this subclass.

data = {"a": [1, 2, 3], "b": [10, 12, 13]}

df = SubclassedDataFrame(data)
df.description = "About my data"
df.head().description  # prints 'About my data'

df_orig = pd.DataFrame(data)
df_orig.description = "About my data"
df_orig.head().description  # raises AttributeError

SQL Server - Can you add field descriptions in CREATE TABLE?

While you can't do it in CREATE TABLE, you can do it at the same time, in the same database script, using this approach:

CREATE table T1 (id int , name char (20))

EXEC   sp_addextendedproperty 'MS_Description', 'Employee ID', 'user', dbo, 'table', 'T1', 'column', id

EXEC   sp_addextendedproperty 'MS_Description', 'Employee Name', 'user', dbo, 'table', 'T1', 'column', name

Then you can see your entries using this:

SELECT   *
FROM   ::fn_listextendedproperty (NULL, 'user', 'dbo', 'table', 'T1', 'column', default)

How to add column description with transform_df in Foundry?

Unfortunately it's not currently possible to output column descriptions with transform_df, you have to use the transform decorator for this. This is because transform_df returns a native Spark DataFrame, which doesn't support column descriptions.

More information about column descriptions is available in the Palantir docs on column metadata.

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