I know people don't like to hear this, but the best suggestion I would offer is to engage the services of a data management professional.

Unless, of course, this is a...

Have read this article a few times now since it was originally published. Still as relevant today as 5 years ago. I hope Steve will continue to bump this one...

I recently read a pretty good article on this topic (which I can't locate now, of course).

The summary, basically, was to try to avoid divulging the information. If you're put...

One book that I recommend that will cover the various design artifacts besides just those from "the database world" is David Hay's Requirements Analysis From Business Views to Architecture.

As for...

Here's a small snippet of what my browser's getting:

-- Sorry - my snippet got snipped...

Vertica is the commercialized evolution of the c-store project http://db.csail.mit.edu/projects/cstore/, so if one was interested in playing around with it, set up a Linux VM and get a freely-available compiler...

Good stuff, Mike.

Attached (I hope) is a diagram of the INFORMATION_SCHEMA views that I put together a while back. I've found it quite helpful as a reference for making queries.

TroyK

alittledog (2/25/2008)

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I would treat this effort as a class and offer up the following syllabus:

Materials

David Hay’s Conventions of Thought, Data Model Patterns

Richard Barker's Entity Modelling

Some book on 3rd order...

I agree with Steve. IMO, passing the MS cert exams should be a demonstration of knowledge that you posess and have used in a professional situation. Having said that, you...

Thanks for reading, Timothy.

Any books, classes, or online resources you've found helpful that haven't yet been mentioned?

TroyK

No worries, Bill. I intentionally kept the content a bit light because I specifically wanted to elicit others' opinions and resources here in the discussion. To that end, thanks once...

Thank you for the comments, Bill.

Correct - if you're looking for specific examples or "how to", this article isn't it. See my earlier series "Toward Integrity" for that:

Impossible to say for sure without a full explanation of the business rules (best presented within a conceptual model of some kind) and the design criteria you hold most important.

As...

Good point, Matt. The tradeoff involved in uniqueness is a function of accurately analyzing the universe of discourse. What is unique for the stored information may not be unique in...

The choice of a primary key should be based on the following attributes:

- uniqueness

- simplicity

- irreducibility

- stability (related to what you're calling immutability)

- familiarity

In some cases, the above desired attributes...