Whatever happened to Database Table Refactoring?
Phil Factor ponders why most people lost their initial enthusiasm for refactoring databases iteratively, in parallel with the evolutionary design of the rest of the system.
2015-09-21
183 reads
Phil Factor
- Interests: Motorbikes, Beer, gardening, conservation, Local history.
2015-08-31
294 reads
Nope to NoOps, No way to NoDBA
Phil Factor suspect the NoOps movement is dressing up some old mistakes in fancy new clothes.
2015-08-17
258 reads
Are DacPacs ready for prime-time?
DacPacs have been around for a while but DBAs have not, in the past, taken them particularly seriously. Is it time to get involved and influence the way the technology develops?
2015-07-20
166 reads
Is the role of the DBA really changing radically?
The term 'DBA' has been the despair of the IT industry, particularly IT recruitment, because there has been so little consensus as to what, precisely, it means. Phil Factor tries to clarify.
2015-07-06
212 reads
Not a cloud to be seen
Phil factor find much to admire in the StackOverflow architecture. It is built on SQL Server, doesn't use microservices or the cloud. It all seems a bit retro, but it manages manage 440 million queries a day, peaking at 8500 queries per second, and never even breaks into a sweat.
2015-06-29
129 reads
Not Only a Meeting of Minds, but of Open Minds.
In which Phil Factor claims that professional application development requires a broad knowledge base.
2015-05-11
102 reads
Don't exaggerate the difficulties of the RDBMS
Phil Factor argues that in learning about relational databases such as SQL Server, we should encourage people to "break a few pots".
2015-04-13
156 reads
Obedience Training For Databases: Cascading Constraints
In which Phil Factor illustrates in TSQL how it is possible to use foreign key constraints to enforce data rules, and illustrates some surprising consequences of using cascading.
2015-03-30
3,057 reads
One Rule, Umpteen Constraints
Despite being deprecated for many years, Phil Factor explains why RULEs are still hanging on in there in SQL Server 2014.
2015-03-30
105 reads
Blogs
AI: Blog a Day – Day 5: Notebooks, Hugging face models and Fine Tuning
By Vinay Thakur
Continuing from Day 4 where we learned Encoder, Decoder, and Attention Mechanism, today we...
AI: Blog a Day – Day 4: Transformers – Encoder, Decoder, and Attention
By Vinay Thakur
Continuing from Day 3 where we covered LLM models open/closed and their parameters, Today...
Flyway Tips: Multiple Projects
By Steve Jones
One of the nice things about Flyway Desktop is that it helps you manage...
Forums
Can an Azure App Service Managed Identity be used for SQL Login?
I'm fairly certain I know the answer to this from digging into it yesterday,...
Azure Synapse database refresh
Hi Team, I am trying to refresh the Azure Synapse Dedicated pool from production...
how to write this query?
hi everyone I am not sure how to write the query that will produce...
Question of the Day
Fun with JSON I
I have some data in a table:
CREATE TABLE #test_data
(
id INT PRIMARY KEY,
name VARCHAR(100),
birth_date DATE
);
-- Step 2: Insert rows
INSERT INTO #test_data
VALUES
(1, 'Olivia', '2025-01-05'),
(2, 'Emma', '2025-03-02'),
(3, 'Liam', '2025-11-15'),
(4, 'Noah', '2025-12-22');
If I run this query, how many rows are returned?
SELECT *
FROM OPENJSON(
(
SELECT t.* FROM #test_data AS t FOR JSON PATH
)
) t; See possible answers