Print the blueprint of your database

- [Instructor] Occasionally you may need to provide a written set of specifications on how your database was created and all the details about what makes it tick. A tool called the database documenter, makes that task as easy as pressing the print button. You'll find it underneath the database tools ribbon, inside of the analyze group. Here, the top is the database documenter, and when you click on that, you'll bring up this window, where you can choose the different objects that exist inside of your database. I'm gonna go through and select one table and one query just by placing a check mark next to them. We'll choose the guest credit cards table, as well as the check-in analysis query.

You can include as many or as few objects as you want in your report. When you've selected everything you wanna include, press the okay button. That'll open up the report in print preview mode. You can send it to the printer or export it to a PDF file, or you can just click the plus icon on the screen in order to zoom in. Let's take a look at what's included. Here at the very top, we have an indication of the database file that we're taking a look at, as well as a date stamp. Up first is the table that we selected, the guests credit cards table, and we have a listing of all it's different properties. Next, below that, we have the different columns that make up that table.

We can go ahead and scroll down and see those properties. For instance, the very first column is the credit card ID, the long integer data type has a size of four, and it has all these other properties, including column width and column order and GU ID and so on. As you can see, it's a really detailed list. So it goes on. It tells us all the different columns that make up that table. We can over to page two if we want. These are additional columns that are in that table. Let's go ahead and page through a couple more times. After the description of the columns, we can see what relationships exist on this table and what fields are related on.

We can also see if there's any table indexes that are involved in this table. Let's go ahead and scroll down a little bit more. We have some user permissions down at the bottom. Let's go to the next page and head back up to the top. And finally we have group permissions for this table. On the next page, we'll start the query that we looked at, the check-in analysis query. Again, it starts with properties. Then we have the SQL syntax that makes up this query. This is what's running behind the scenes in Access. Again, we have some descriptions on the different columns that make up this query, including references to the different tables that these fields come from.

So we can go to the next page. After the fields that appear in the columns of the query, we have table indexes. Let's go to the next page. We have some more details about those indexes. And finally we get to the end of the report, that has user permissions and group permissions. So as you can see, anything you could possibly want to know about how this object was built, can be found in the database documentation report. The database documenter is great tool for generating the blueprint of your database and is something that can be printed out and saved as PDF file in a remote offsite location.

Just in case disaster ever strikes and you need to recreate your database all over again. It can also be a handy report to have, when sharing the construction progress with colleagues, in order to get valuable input and feedback on the direction that you're taking with it's design.