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Best Practices Article or Video

  • September 17, 2013 at 11:49 am

    #298786

    Hello all -

    A few months ago, I was brought into the office I'm at to bring order to the chaos. Their "database" designs were just awful - the worse I've probably ever seen. It has been my job to design, map out, and consolidate all these "databases" which I believe I've done. Before it goes from design to development, I'd just like to do my homework and look into common pitfalls and flaws. I'm paranoid that I've overlooked a newbie mistake and will regret it later. I have dozens of tables and hundreds of thousands of records to account for.

    Can anyone recommend a good article or video I can check out? Anything along the lines of common mistakes is great.....

  • September 17, 2013 at 12:29 pm

    #1650894

    If you google for SQL Server top 10 design mistakes you can find some good leads.

    Kevin Kline has a session about this, you might find a recording online.

    Here are the slides:

    http://www.quest.com/sql_server/pdfs/Top-10-Mistakes-on%20SQL-Server.pdf[/url]

    Need an answer? No, you need a question
    My blog at https://sqlkover.com.
    MCSE Business Intelligence - Microsoft Data Platform MVP

  • September 17, 2013 at 1:21 pm

    #1650905

    To add to that, be very aware that what some folks call "Best Practices" are nothing more than wanton personal opinion or sometimes based on "standards" that are impossible to meet in the real world. I agree that most "Best Practices" concerning normalization are spot on but you'll also run into such "Best Practices" as "make all code ANSI standard for reasons of portability", which is actually impossible to do even on the simplest of stored procedures that take a parameter. You'll also find "Best Practices" that denounce the use of the IDENTITY column property and, although there is certain merit to that, such merits apply to only very limite circumstances.

    There are other "Best Practices" that you should normally follow (there are exceptions to every "rule") such as keeping Clustered Indexes narrow, unique, and ever-increasing (and, usually, NOT NULL).

    --Jeff Moden

    RBAR is pronounced "ree-bar" and is a "Modenism" for Row-By-Agonizing-Row.
    First step towards the paradigm shift of writing Set Based code:
    ________Stop thinking about what you want to do to a ROW... think, instead, of what you want to do to a COLUMN.

    Change is inevitable... Change for the better is not.

    Helpful Links:
    How to post code problems
    How to Post Performance Problems
    Create a Tally Function (fnTally)

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