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 SQL DDL statement that Steve never knew about is the subject of today's editorial.
2025-04-04
112 reads
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
Steve has a few thoughts on natural keys, which often turn out not to be as unique as we expect.
2025-03-03
146 reads
Companies of all sizes and across industries are struggling to cope with an explosion of data never before seen in the short history of computing. As applications reach new levels of sophistication and become deeply interconnected, these companies find themselves increasingly overworked, overheated, and at their wits’ end, desperately trying to squeeze just a bit more performance and availability out of their aging database architectures.
2024-10-11
If you’ve ever had a traditional logic course, you’ll have run into “The Law of Identity” as the founding principle of all Western thought. It says that: “To be is to be something in particular; to be nothing in particular or anything in general, is to be nothing at all.”
2024-10-07
All developers hit the problem of how and where to store and set their configuration, profile, or initial data. A long time ago, it was generally decided that simple text files containing key/values were best, stored with the application. After all, you are relying on being able to entice busy people to get the permanent settings right for their requirements, folks who are generally not interested in your elegant computer science constructs. Not only that, but the settings must be parsed very quickly and efficiently, otherwise a process that uses the tool will slow to a crawl.
2024-10-04
Many years ago, my wife and I wrote an article for Datamation, a major trade publication at the time, under the title, “Don’t Warehouse Dirty Data!” It’s been referenced quite a few times over the decades but is nowhere to be found using Google these days. The point is, if you have written a report using data, you have no doubt felt the pain of dirty data and it is nothing new.
2024-09-27
This tip will help you understand what NULL means and different ways to handle NULL values when working with SQL Server data.
2024-07-08
Steve sees that poor database design is the reality of the world and we have to work around that.
2024-06-07
251 reads
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I try to run this code on SQL Server 2022. All the objects exist in the database.
CREATE OR ALTER VIEW OrderShipping
AS
SELECT cl.CityNameID,
cl.CityName,
o.OrderID,
o.Customer,
o.OrderDate,
o.CustomerID,
o.cityId
FROM dbo.CityList AS cl
INNER JOIN dbo.[Order] AS o ON o.cityId = cl.CityNameID
GO
CREATE OR ALTER FUNCTION GetShipCityForOrder
(
@OrderID INT
)
RETURNS VARCHAR(50)
WITH SCHEMABINDING
AS
BEGIN
DECLARE @city VARCHAR(50);
SELECT @city = os.CityName
FROM dbo.OrderShipping AS os
WHERE os.OrderID = @OrderID;
RETURN @city;
END;
go
What is the result? See possible answers