I would suggest that your date key be an small integer rather than a date data type. That would mean that there will be a day that is 1,...

Completely disagree. Your first job in extraction is to own the data. ...

You don't go into details, but I think I have to maintain some solutions you would consider "clever." And yes, they...

It depends on the developer, but in most cases no. When I was a developer, it was okay, because...

Will have to disagree. I've seen DW systems that without the hard RI end up with issues. With all of...

Have done OLTP databases from scratch, though not for a while. More common these days is to do OLAP from scratch. And while it's almost impossible to get...

It sounds hard only because someone else didn't follow the correct methods at the source data. If that's been done correctly, it's not that hard. ...

I do not create a primary key on fact tables unless I need to relate those facts to another fact table (in which case I add a surrogate key, identity,...

One little point is that in a data warehousing situation you honestly believe that we're going to add referential integrity? These data marts are built by SSIS packages from sources...

They use disks on Star Trek: The Original Series, so maybe disks will make a comeback at some point.;-)

Is the original data column a varchar(max)? If so, this shows some of the potential hazard with using that data type instead of restricting it to some appropriate amount.

Trying to report off of tables that are constantly being backfilled with millions and millions of records of credit card information just doesn't work without the nolock, otherwise you'll be...

I find it odd that people use that justification for nolock when read committed snapshot gives you the same ability to read without being blocked and doesn't also sometimes return...

But, if you got caught flat footed and had to submit to being interviewed in the next 10 minutes, would you fail the interview just because you didn't have time...

Disagree. It never hurts to review the basics even though you know them to...