Welcome to the community! The first thing you need to do is read the forum rules. You post something, you should include DDL and a clear statement of your problem....

Codd never says anything about the physical implementation. This abstraction makes soooo many different implementations. 🙂

The savings that you're getting from creating your own surrogates are because of the architecture, not anything inherent in SQL. We inherited a UNIX model of files based on magnetic...

Let me quote from my own book (SQL FOR SMARTLIES, 4.1.3). The ACM source is at the end.

Finally, an appeal to authority, with a quote from Dr. Codd: ".. Database...

Wrong. Look up "perfect hashing" and "minimal perfect hashing" in the literature, In particular, the work of R. J. Cichelli. Then find someone who has worked with Teradata and talk...

Dr. Codd defined a surrogate key as being generated by the database engine and never exposed to the users. What he had in mind would be more like a hashing...

>> I'm curious why yyyy-mm-dd is considered ambiguous where yyyymmdd isn't, ie., why do dashes change the nature of the interpretation? <<

The problem with the all digits string is it...

Just think about the logic for a minute.. I have a target table (seats) and a source table (passengers). I can only put one passenger in one seat. That's what...

You're just being silly and trying to confuse implementation with language design.. What if I had an SQL implementation that used hashing instead of indexes? The order of the columns...

Actually Microsoft is been trying very hard to move away from the old Sybase code Museum. This is why you write infixed join operators today, instead of the old extended...

Why would I take up an ANSI/ISO standard with Microsoft? I don't think you understand how international standards are set. Vendors can take part in the committees, but they have...

>> Actually, the format YYYYMMDD is perfectly acceptable under ISO. I don't know why Celko insists on repeating his false claim over and over about YYYY-MM-DD despite being told that...

The only display format allowed in ANSI/ISO standard SQL is based on ISO standard 8601. This is "yyyy-mm-dd" and after the metric system, it's probably the most commonly used ISO...

I think you missed one of the important parts of the table in SQL and how it's different from a file. Please remember the phrase "logical is not the same...

>> I have a table with customer ids and different something_stages a customer can be in starting with A, B, C and D each starting at different dates. <<

Then we...