Proper Storage and Handling of Personal Names

As database developers, we may need to rethink the way we store and handle personal names

Design Errors : PK's with multiple columns on table with identity

Find Tables with identity, which should have PK with 1 column but have a PK with multiple columns or where the unique identity is contained in other indexes.

Design Errors : PK's with multiple columns on table with identity

Find Tables with identity, which should have PK with 1 column but have a PK which is clustered but has multiple columns.

The ABCs of Database Creation

Creating SQL Server databases is easier than the internet may lead us to believe.

How to get Database Design Horribly Wrong

Database Design is one of those tasks where you have to carefully get all the major aspects right. If you mess-up just one of these, it can all go horribly wrong. So what are these aspects that can ruin database design, and how can you get them right? Robert Sheldon explains.

Defusing Database Time Bombs: Avoiding the Need to Refactor Databases

Where applications are evolved by gradually molding them to a growing understanding of the business domain, this presents great challenges to database development. If databases are designed too loosely, and initial errors are allowed to fester, the results become harder and harder to refactor until eventually they constitute a database time bomb. Thomas LeBlanc describes how to avoid a few basic, but very common, database time bombs.

Is a foreign key constraint an index? If not, is an index automatically created in order to enforce it?

Is a Primary Key an index?

EAV

Relational Model versus XML