Department of Redundancy Department
Ever wonder all the reasons that we use databases instead of file systems? While we don’t think of it too much anymore, the first reason that databases came into existence was to remove redundancies.
2024-04-12
Database Design and Implementation
2023-11-27
3,932 reads
Do You Still Use CHAR?
When designing a database, choosing good datatypes is important, but not necessarily all the time. Today Steve wonders if you still use fixed sting data types.
2022-02-11
200 reads
Mathematicians and SQL
Georg Ferdinand Ludwig Philipp Cantor is considered the creator of set theory, and his theories are the basis for the naïve set theory you learned in school. But there are lots of other mathematicians you should know, such as Hilbert, Frege, Russell, Zermelo and Dedekind. They made a lot of contributions, too. Hilbert Hilbert is […]
2021-01-19
5,550 reads
Data Element Names and Scoping Rules in SQL
How you name data elements in databases and applications programs has often been a matter of personal taste. Decades ago, when I worked for state government, there is a COBOL programmer who would pick a theme for his programs. The paragraphs and variables would be named based on the current theme. One of his programs […]
2021-01-11
2,023 reads
Understanding Data Modeling Part 4: Fact Modeling
In Part 1 we presented some foundation knowledge with which to debunk misconceptions lurking in the "data models" mess in the industry that Friesendal has tried to catalog. In...
2019-05-04
The Blast Radius of a database
Phil Factor feels that the database gets the short shrift in any outage - it's time to stop saying "the database has gone down" and time to start thinking about the resilience of the entire system.
2019-05-04
461 reads
Downgrading A SQL Server Database To An Older Version
"How do I restore a SQL Server backup to a previous version of SQL Server?" is a commonly-asked question. The answer, of course, is you don't - but if you must, there may be some solutions.
2019-05-03
Should I pluralize table names, is it Person, Persons, People or People?
There is a lot of confusion when it comes to designing tables in SQL Server around whether to pluralize names or not. How do you choose whether to pluralize or not?
2019-05-03
Designing Highly Scalable Database Architectures
While architecting cloud native applications, you need to ensure that your system is highly available, performant, scalable, fault tolerant, and has the capability to recover from a disaster scenario. In this article, Samir Behara discusses the options available when designing the database architecture to achieve scalability.
2019-05-02
Blogs
Migrate datetime data to datetimeoffset with AT TIME ZONE
By Will Assaf
I recently reviewed, worked on, and added a similar example to the DATETIMEOFFSET Microsoft...
The Comprehensive Guide to Mastering Your SQL DBA Skills
Database administrators (DBAs) are the backbone of data-driven organizations. If you're looking to break...
Friday Basics: Authentication vs. Authorization
By Brian Kelley
Another security fundamentals topic is authentication versus authorization. For those who have a clear...
Forums
The OS returned the error '(null)' while attempting 'DeleteFile' filestream.hdr
I have a SQL Server 2019 Enterprise Edition on CU 25. It has in-memory...
Performance
Experts, I am learning some skills so I can troubleshoot some performance-related issues. I...
Question of the Day
Two Table Hints
What happens when I run this code:
SELECT p.ProductName , p.ProductCategory FROM dbo.Product AS p WITH (NOLOCK, TABLOCK);See possible answers