Customize DDL for table/column comments in PowerDesigner

In several projects, FastChangeCo's data modelers on the Data Management Center of Excellence (DMCE) team had an issue with the way PowerDesigner generates comments for tables and columns for the SQL Server database. Xuefang Kaya (one of the data modelers on the team), asked about the problems, says to the DMCE team:

"No, it's not that PowerDesigner refuses to generate the comments at all. It's more that PowerDesigner is generating the wrong DDL for the SQL Server."

What is the problem?

Change the default value in PowerDesigner or add a new one

At FastChangeCo, the data modelers within the Data Management Center of Excellence (DMCE) team are constantly designing new database objects to store data. One of the data modelers on the team is Xuefang Kaya. When she takes a new user story/task, she usually models multiple tables, their columns, and specifies a data type for each column.

For example, if a column needs to store the timestamp for an event, Xuefang sets the date/time data type for that column (in that case, it even depends on the database in each case). If additional columns have to store names and addresses, it sets the columns to the ‘text’ data type.

Create a customized DBMS resource file

PowerDesigner offers the possibility to edit the properties for a database in the so-called DBMS resource files.

The DMBS resource files contain all information for PowerDesigner to generate DDL, DML and other SQL artifacts. For many databases, there are pre-built, included DBMS resource files for the different database versions. For example, Microsoft SQL Server 2012 and 2017 or Snowflake.