I'm wondering if there is a utility that exists to create a data dictionary for a MySQL database.
I'm considering just writing a php script that fetches the meta data about the database and displays it in a logical format for users to understand but I'd rather avoid that if there is some pre-built utility out there that can simply do this for me.
Have you looked into HeidiSQL or phpMyAdmin?
Also, MySQL Admin.
Edit#1 fixed typo, added more info
Looks like MySQL Admin is now MySQL Workbench and you need the Enterprise version to get their reporting tool called DBDoc. It explains a little about customizing DBDoc reporting templates at http://dev.mysql.com/doc/workbench/en/dbdoc-templates.html
Take a look at https://stackoverflow.com/a/26703098/4208132
There is a db_doc.lua plugin for MySQL Workbench CE
[EDITED]
It seems that the LUA plugin support was discontinued.
So I wrote a plugin in Python to generate data dictionaries.
It is available at: https://github.com/rsn86/MWB-DBDocPy
The easiest thing to do is Download Toad for MySQL, which is free, and create your own query against the mysql information_schema internal database. You can add columns you want to the query below. Then select all results and export as csv using TOAD.
use information_schema;
desc columns;
select c.table_name, c.column_name, c.data_type from columns c
where c.table_schema = "mydatabaseinstance";