Grant Fritchey (2/10/2010)

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If you go with the arc, there's nothing inherently evil in it. It's not a good design, but the world won't come to an end if you use...

Another book I highly recommend: "Data and Reality" by William Kent. Not much about how to design a database but lots about understanding the problems of data and data models.

"Information Modeling and Relational Databases" by Terry Halpin

"Practical Issues in Data Management" by Fabian Pascal

C.J.Date's "Relational Database Writings" series of books are all very good on database problems and concepts,...

Sorry, my blog is temporarily offline.

This is my example of a disjoint subtype pattern:

CREATE TABLE Products

(SKU INT NOT NULL PRIMARY KEY,

ProductType CHAR(1) NOT NULL

CHECK (ProductType...

Dave,

Very loosely speaking you probably have the right understanding of normalization - although it would certainly help you to understand it in more formal terms if you don't already. Normalization...

No it doesn't. Windows clusters are failover-only for resilience and availability, whereas RAC is a MPP technology for...

Tom.Thomson (2/8/2010)

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Not in any...

I was a SQL Server MVP for 5 years, 2004-2008.

I think that "democratizing" MVP selection online would devalue the programme. Online elections are too fickle and open to influences that...

I think this might be close to what you want. Not sure about the INSERT bit. I probably haven't interpreted your requirements perfectly but maybe you will get the idea....

Try not to think of it in terms of steps or repeating things X number of times. Instead think in sets. Think about the joins and end results you want.

The...

mbender (2/4/2010)

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Basically i have a select statement that I need to pull some information from then run some logic against it then either run a update statement or insert statement...

Does that mean...

Another discussion on the future of SQL started by Matt Whitfield:

http://ask.sqlservercentral.com/questions/3503/is-sql-on-the-way-out

The thing that made me doubt it...

Matt Miller (#4) (1/30/2010)

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NULL isn't a value. Remember - it's a state, representing a lack of known value (which interestingly enough is what your flag idea was supposed to...