To design, or redesign, a database of any complexity, the Entity-Relationship modelling tool becomes essential. The specialized tools that have dominated the industry for a long while are expensive and are installed on a workstation. Now that browser technology has progressed so rapidly, the online database modelling tools have become viable and are starting to attract the attention of database designers. Are they good enough to use now? Robert Sheldon finds out.

Building Better Software

by Steve Jones

SQLServerCentral.com

Editorial

Steve Jones discusses the idea of building software better, and why that's a challenge for many of us.

Find a String in a String in SQL Server

by Steve Jones

SQLServerCentral.com

T-SQL

Learn how you can find data in a string and extract it, no matter where it's located.

Getting Started with JSON Support in SQL Server 2016 – Part 2

by Additional Articles

Database Journal

JSON

Arshad Ali talks about using OPENJSON to read and parse JSON data and looks at how to convert it to tabular format.

The Slack Integration

by Steve Jones

SQLServerCentral.com

Editorial

Slack has become a popular phenomenon in the technical world, especially for software developers. Should we join in?

Disabling SQL Server Optimizer Rules with QUERYRULEOFF

by Additional Articles

MSSQLTips.com

QUERYRULEOFF

Daniel Farina shows how to disable the optimizer rules by using QUERYRULEOFF, an undocumented hint.

The Data Driven Event

by Steve Jones

SQLServerCentral.com

Editorial

In a couple of days, Microsoft is holding Data Driven, an event that will highlight SQL Server 2016.

SQL GROUP BY Basics

by Additional Articles

SimpleTalk

GROUP BY

It sometimes pays to go back and look at what you think you already know about SQL. Joe Celko gives a quick revision of the GROUP BY and HAVING clauses in SQL that are the bedrock of any sort of analysis of data, and comes up with some nuggets that may not be entirely obvious.