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
282 reads
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
6,014 reads
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
229 reads
Georg Ferdinand Ludwig Philipp Cantor is considered the creator of set theory, and his theories are the basis for the naïve set theory you learned in school. But there are lots of other mathematicians you should know, such as Hilbert, Frege, Russell, Zermelo and Dedekind. They made a lot of contributions, too. Hilbert Hilbert is […]
2021-01-19
5,630 reads
How you name data elements in databases and applications programs has often been a matter of personal taste. Decades ago, when I worked for state government, there is a COBOL programmer who would pick a theme for his programs. The paragraphs and variables would be named based on the current theme. One of his programs […]
2021-01-11
2,182 reads
In Part 1 we presented some foundation knowledge with which to debunk misconceptions lurking in the "data models" mess in the industry that Friesendal has tried to catalog. In...
2019-05-04
Phil Factor feels that the database gets the short shrift in any outage - it's time to stop saying "the database has gone down" and time to start thinking about the resilience of the entire system.
2019-05-04
489 reads
By John
If you’ve used Azure SQL Managed Instance General Purpose, you know the drill: to...
By DataOnWheels
Ramblings of a retired data architect Let me start by saying that I have...
By Steve Jones
A customer was testing Redgate Data Modeler and complained that it auto-generated PK names....
Hi everyone, Below is a consolidated summary of what we validated Architecture & data...
Hi all, I recently moved to a new employer who have their HA setup...
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Semantic Search in SQL Server...
I have this data in a SQL Server 2025 table:
CREATE TABLE Response ( ResponseID INT NOT NULL CONSTRAINT ResponsePK PRIMARY KEY , ResponseVal VARBINARY(5000) ) GOIf I want to get a value from this table that I can add to a URL in a browser, which of these code items produces a result I can use? See possible answers