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
238 reads
Database Design and Implementation
Mathematicians and SQL
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
5,685 reads
Data Element Names and Scoping Rules in SQL
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
2,213 reads
Understanding Data Modeling Part 4: Fact Modeling
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
The Blast Radius of a database
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
506 reads
Downgrading A SQL Server Database To An Older Version
"How do I restore a SQL Server backup to a previous version of SQL Server?" is a commonly-asked question. The answer, of course, is you don't - but if you must, there may be some solutions.
2019-05-03
Should I pluralize table names, is it Person, Persons, People or People?
There is a lot of confusion when it comes to designing tables in SQL Server around whether to pluralize names or not. How do you choose whether to pluralize or not?
2019-05-03
Designing Highly Scalable Database Architectures
While architecting cloud native applications, you need to ensure that your system is highly available, performant, scalable, fault tolerant, and has the capability to recover from a disaster scenario. In this article, Samir Behara discusses the options available when designing the database architecture to achieve scalability.
2019-05-02
Understanding Data Modeling Part 2: "E/RM" and "RDM"
In Part 1 we presented some foundation knowledge with which to debunk misconceptions lurking in the industry's modeling mess that Friesendal has tried to map, and to show how...
2019-04-22
Understanding Your Database
Steve notes that many of us might not completely understand every part of our database, but it's information that can be helpful in cleaning out unnecessary entities.
2019-04-10
588 reads
Blogs
Automated SQL Server Benchmarking with HammerDB and Docker: A Complete Testing Framework
I’m excited to announce the release of a new open-source project that fully automates...
T-SQL Snapshot Backups on Availability Group Secondary Replicas
One of my favourite features of SQL Server 2022 was the T-SQL Snapshot Backups....
The Book of Redgate: Hours
By Steve Jones
I have said and written this many times: Redgate Software is the type of...
Forums
Optional Parameter Plan Optimization in SQL Server 2025: Fixing the Kitchen-Sink Search Procedure
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Optional Parameter Plan Optimization in...
AI Experience Gap that we keep talking about
Comments posted to this topic are about the item AI Experience Gap that we...
Question of the Day
ORDER BY alias
There is a table tmp_tab:
CREATE TABLE tmp_tab ( id int, val int );
INSERT INTO tmp_tab VALUES (1, 1), (2, NULL), (3, 3), (4, 4), (5, 5);You want to order the rows ids by the following expression:
ISNULL(val, id) + 1Which of the following queries produces the expected ordering and why? (Select all correct) See possible answers