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
75 reads
Database Design and Implementation
Poor Name Choice
Steve has a few thoughts on the names we choose for tables, columns, files, and more.
2025-11-07
122 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
116 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
A Poor Data Model
Steve has a few thoughts on natural keys, which often turn out not to be as unique as we expect.
2025-03-03
152 reads
Database Sharding: Strategies for Seamless Scaling and Performance Optimization
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
Uniqueness, Keys, and Identity
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
Storing and Retrieving the Initialization and Configuration Data for Applications
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
Bad Data and Dirty Databases
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
Blogs
Finding the Last Last Name in SQL: #SQLNewBlogger
By Steve Jones
I wrote a piece on the new SUBSTRING in SQL Server 2025 and got...
SQL Server 2025 GAs Today
By Steve Jones
If you aren’t watching the Ignite keynotes today, then you might have missed the...
Run SQL Server 2025 and SQL Server Management Studio on macOS Tahoe
Short version You want to get this running as fast as possible. Do these...
Forums
Email change does not work
I changed my email address in Edit Profile page, but it has no effect...
The case for "Understanding our business" training
Comments posted to this topic are about the item The case for "Understanding our...
Specifying the Collation
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Specifying the Collation
Question of the Day
Specifying the Collation
I am dealing with issues on my SQL Server 2022 instance related to collation. I have an instance collation of Latin1_General_CS_AS_KS_WS, but a database collation of Latin1_General_CI_AS. I want to force a few queries to run with a specified collation by using code like this:
DECLARE @c VARCHAR(20) = 'Latin1_General_CI_AS'
SELECT p.PersonType,
p.Title,
p.LastName,
c.CustomerID,
c.AccountNumber
FROM Person.Person AS p
INNER JOIN Sales.Customer AS c
ON c.PersonID = p.BusinessEntityID
COLLATE @c
Will this solve my problem? See possible answers