2026-04-13
111 reads
Database Design and Implementation
SQL Server Data Warehouse Concepts, Schema Design, and Implementation
Companies generate a huge amount of data on a daily basis from such things as sales transactions, inventory changes, and customer interactions. This data originates from different data sources and is stored in operational databases called OLTP (Online Transaction Processing) systems that primary focuses on transactions like data inserts, updates or deletes. Maintaining the transactional data in an OLTP database is important. However, if you need to analyze or report on the data, storing the data in a centralized repository in well-structured schema is necessary.
2026-03-30
What are database keys? A practical guide
There’s not much to database keys, right? When you build a new table, you add a column to act as the primary key, then set it to auto-generate. Done. That’s all there is to know…right?
2026-03-25
Designing SQL Server Pipelines That Are Ready for AI Before You Actually Need AI
Introduction. Why AI Readiness Starts in the Database You probably don’t need machine learning today. Most organizations don’t. You already have reporting dashboards, operational workflows, and business intelligence that work just fine without neural networks or predictive models. That’s not a failure. It’s normal. The problem doesn’t show up immediately. It shows up a few […]
2026-02-27
2,328 reads
Don't Let Corner Cases Drive Your Design
When we design a database or system, we often do so with corner cases in mind. We don't have to do this.
2025-12-01
115 reads
Being Mindful of Design Time
Do you take the time to model and design your database? Steve thinks this is important, even while trying to make changes quicker to adapt to changing requirements.
2025-11-14
103 reads
Poor Name Choice
Steve has a few thoughts on the names we choose for tables, columns, files, and more.
2025-11-07
140 reads
Data Encoding Schemes
Your choice of how you encode data can be significant. With computers and databases, you have a wide range of options. As a programmer, you will likely be called upon at some time in your career to design and coding scheme for particular application. It would really help if you at least avoided designing a bad one.
2025-06-30
A Domain for Data
A SQL DDL statement that Steve never knew about is the subject of today's editorial.
2025-04-04
141 reads
Scales & Measurements
If you’re going to work with databases, you probably ought to know something about data. In particular, we don’t put data directly into a database; we have to encode it and represent it in a format which a machine can handle.
2025-04-02
Blogs
Microsoft Purview data governance best practices
By James Serra
Microsoft Purview can be the best data governance tool in the world, but it...
AI and Data Engineering on the Edge: The Good, the Bad, and the Overhyped
Running AI and data pipelines on the edge instead of the cloud has gone...
UNION vs UNIONALL: #SQLNewBlogger
By Steve Jones
While writing another post I realized my UNION query didn’t work as one might...
Forums
Replacing Maintenance tasks now using SSMS 22 - what to do with File operations
Unfortunately I'm using SSMS 22. It didn't come with maintenance plans by default. I...
Secure Cached Plans
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Secure Cached Plans
Complex Data Processing with dbt Python Models: The Fabric Modern Data Platform
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Complex Data Processing with dbt...
Question of the Day
Secure Cached Plans
The DMV, sys.dm_exec_cached_plans, contains rows for each cached plan on an instance. In Azure SQL Database, not every used has rights to every database, as there does exist an instance behind each database. How is security handled for this DMV in Azure?
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