Technical Article

Healthcare Data Models Matter

Healthcare applications come and go, but data live on forever. We’ve seen that since the beginning of the computer industry; when we move from legacy systems into more “modern” architectures, we often leave behind applications, but we almost always take along the data into the future. Even though data are so important, we in health-IT don’t seem to spend the quality time necessary to structure our schemas and databases in such a way as to make it easier to maintain in the future. We often don’t design our data models solidly, and we don’t test them well by putting them through simulations or design them for multiple versions.

SQLServerCentral Article

Lookup Table Madness

Are you mad? Not angry, more like crazy when it comes to designing databases in SQL Server? Don Peterson has met a few people he thinks are just that when it comes to building lookup tables. Does it stem from poor understanding of database design? Or do you disagree? Read Don's case against this particular design practice.

Technical Article

Free SSIS Events and Code Camp

There are a few upcoming SQL\SSIS\Developer events coming up in the next week. Andy Warren and Brian Knight will be speaking at Code Camp in Orlando (a free full day event) and Brian will be doing a SSIS event in Philadelphia. For more information, see this blog post.

Technical Article

Ten of the Biggest Mistakes Developers Make With Databases

You may be wonderfully up-to-date with an AJAX Web interface or the latest whizbang Windows user interface, but under the covers, you're probably still pumping data in and out of a database, just as we all did a decade or more ago. That makes it all the more surprising that developers are still making the same database mistakes that date back to those good old days of Windows 95 and before.

External Article

Two Stops Short of Dagenham

One of the best programmers I ever met was referred to, in Essex jargon, as being ‘two stops short of Dagenham’ (Barking)*. This was once no obstacle to the world of work…the best development teams I’ve worked on embraced the whole gamut of humanity

Blogs

Who’s the Winningest Coach (with AI Help)

By

I was listening to the radio the other day and the hosts were discussing...

Learning from Mistakes: T-SQL Tuesday #194

By

We’re a week late, once again my fault. I was still coming out of...

Stupid Things I Did With AI: ASCII Art

By

I ran across this article recently (https://www.gatesnotes.com/meet-bill/source-code/reader/microsoft-original-source-code) and it has a great opening piece...

Read the latest Blogs

Forums

Learning From Breakage

By Steve Jones - SSC Editor

Comments posted to this topic are about the item Learning From Breakage

Python in Action to Auto-Generate an Optimized PostgreSQL Index Strategy

By sabyda

Comments posted to this topic are about the item Python in Action to Auto-Generate...

Adding and Dropping Columns I

By Steve Jones - SSC Editor

Comments posted to this topic are about the item Adding and Dropping Columns I

Visit the forum

Question of the Day

Adding and Dropping Columns I

I have this table in my SQL Server 2022 database: 

CREATE TABLE [dbo].[CityList]
(
[CityNameID] [int] NOT NULL IDENTITY(1, 1),
[CityName] [varchar] (30) COLLATE SQL_Latin1_General_CP1_CI_AS NULL
) ON [PRIMARY]
GO
I decide to add two new columns for the StateProvince and Country. What code should I use?

See possible answers