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
167 reads
Database Design and Implementation
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
What does SQL NULL mean and how to handle NULL values
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
Poor Database Design Realities
Steve sees that poor database design is the reality of the world and we have to work around that.
2024-06-07
294 reads
Department of Redundancy Department
Ever wonder all the reasons that we use databases instead of file systems? While we don’t think of it too much anymore, the first reason that databases came into existence was to remove redundancies.
2024-04-12
2023-11-27
6,216 reads
Do You Still Use CHAR?
When designing a database, choosing good datatypes is important, but not necessarily all the time. Today Steve wonders if you still use fixed sting data types.
2022-02-11
233 reads
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?
See possible answers