Abstract
There are no mechanisms for users to provide comments on graphs and charts with aggregated data or at data line level generated from a database. Solutions such as changing schemas of the original database tables or making duplicates of the original tables are sub-optimal and require substantial user effort. This disclosure describes techniques that enable users to add annotations to data records in a database and to retrieve such annotations using data queries, including while extracting aggregations of data. While aggregating the data, annotations from reference data can be included when data is grouped by a particular field. Annotations can be stored in a separate metadata table or as a view within the database. Merging annotations with the data can be accomplished by macros or a table-valued function (TVF). The TVF can be tailored to user specifications to read from specific annotation tables with appropriate selection criteria. Annotations can be displayed anywhere the data is shown. TVFs for public annotation tables can be implemented to select annotations based on moderator-vetting of annotations on these tables, without touching the data being annotated, and multiple annotation tables can be queried if necessary.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
Recommended Citation
Turetsky, Lenny and Klein, Daniel V., "Annotating Table Data Using Separate Tables", Technical Disclosure Commons, (November 18, 2024)
https://www.tdcommons.org/dpubs_series/7549