I don't think we should shape and force a RDMS like SQL Server to act something like a EAV or document database. We've got more data storage options inside SQL...

Entity-Attribute-Value tables are good for modeling operational configuration data; things like configuration strings, thresholds, and client implementation settings. The benefit is that it allows the application developers to easily create...

I'm not on the ETL team, so I can't vouch for the specifics of why the table / indexes were modeled the way they are. However, it appears the index...

I have confirmed with the ETL developers that they are using READ COMMITTED ISOLATION on both remote source database and target database.

The version of the source database server...

Outside the context of ETL staging, if your application must resort to pattern matching on varchar columns when joining tables or filtering rowsets, then your data model is to some...

Also, keep in mind that MIN and MAX are scalar operations, so they will always return a value, like a value of NULL for an empty table. However, SELECT TOP...

Another issue is date/times contained in VARCHAR columns. 

The ISO standard for formatting date strings is YYYYMMDD, and the following check constaint will not only require that the string...

If you're debating whether something like phone number or zip code should be contained as a varchar versus an integer, then I'd rather err on the side of varchar. For...

I don't have a problem with Microsoft's technical implementation of CLR functions in SQL Server. It's just that when folks want execute C# or VB.NET from SQL Server queries, it...