Voice of the DBA

Category: Blog

Setting FK Constraints in Data Modeler

One of the things a customer asked recently about Redgate Data Modeler was how to set a FK constraint between two tables. The tool seemed to make it easy, but they encountered a few errors. Here is how this worked for me.

This is part of a series on Redgate Data Modeler.

Adding a Constraint

This might make more sense in the video walkthrough, but here’s the text version. I want to add a constraint to my model that links the Organization and User tables shown below. This is a 1 (Organization) to many (User) FK.

I don’t have a good FK yet in the child table (User), but that’s OK. I’ll click the Add new reference icon in the upper left of the design surface.

Once I do this, I can click on the Organization table and drag to the User table. That will give me this view. Note that this defaults as a 1:n relationship, so you want to start with the parent. There also is a new “Organization_OrganizationID” column added as a FK.

That’s not a bad pattern, especially with modern Intellisense, where I don’t need to type everything out. This lets me know where the join should be. However, for many of us, we prefer having something simpler, like OrganizationID as the column in the child.

If I want to change this, I can look to the right for the Reference Properties. Note the default name below is User_Organization, which I definitely don’t like.

I can adjust the name to meet my standard, which I’ll do. I can also adjust the FK column, but I’ll need to go to the child table, User, to do this. If I rename that column there, I see this.

When I click back on the reference, I see this. My change for the FK table is there, but the Primary has defaulted to OrganizationName. Fortunately, there’s a drop down where I can change this.

Below this, I have other properties. There’s a color (if you care), but also I can set cascading actions. See the drop down below and the options. These can be set for update or delete. There is also the additional property to set this as not for replication.

Once I do this, the changes are saved. If I generate the SQL script, I can see my FK exists inside the script. You can see the relevant portion below.

Summary

Setting accurate FK constraints is an important part of data modeling. I certainly see the reasons why some people don’t like FKs, but if you set them, you want them to be accurate. Redgate Data Modeler supports this, but it’s not as straightforward as I like. Hopefully that changes over time.

I don’t know that the names matter that much, but in case you are concerned about naming, you can customize this.

Give Redgate Data Modeler a try and see if it helps you and your team get a handle on your database.

February 11, 2026
Webinar: Navigating the Database Landscape in 2026

For a number of years, we’ve produced the State of the Database Landscape report, based on surveys and research we do every year. I have found it very interesting to see how people respond and what we learn from the report each year.

This year is no different, with one change; we’re doing a webinar. Register to hear the advocates talk about navigating the database landscape in 2026. Grant, Kellyn, Pat, and myself are set to sit down and discuss the findings on Feb 18 at 1200pm EST.

We reviewed the report and now each of us is digging in to those areas we are most interested, and we’ll express our thoughts in the webinar. With over 100 years of database experience between us, we hope you’ll enjoy it.

And we are ready to take your questions and discuss and debate the future of our industry.

Register today and I’ll see you on Feb 18.

February 10, 2026
Aging Code for T-SQL Tuesday #195

It’s that time of the month again, with T-SQL Tuesday coming along. I managed to not forget about this and checked with the host. He had an issue, but fortunately I got a friend to step up.

This month Pat Wright has an interesting question, asking how your code has aged. He and I have had a few conversations lately about getting older and when I asked him to host, this was a perfect choice.

I’m definitely getting older, but what about my code?

25 Years Later

Actually a little more, but I wrote a series called “Tame Those Strings” for Swynk a long time ago. That became Database Journal, but during the switch, they stopped paying us authors. A few of us started SQL Server Central and we went live 25 years ago.

In that piece, I referenced the oldest article, which is Tame Those Strings Part 4 – Numeric Conversions. There’s also a part 3, but in those pieces, is that code still useful?

A bit.

These are basic articles looking at string functions that are still heavily in use today. The idea of cleaning phone numbers using REPLACE is still something we might do today. If we are using SQL Server 2025, there are additional functions, but I still see a lot of code that still use multiple CHARINDEX+SUBSTRING or REPLACE functions.

I asked the Prompt AI if it could do better.

It gave me two pieces of code. The first is nested REPLACE() statements. This works, but I find this hard to read. I’d rather have separate statements, for ease of maintenance.

The second is a single statement, using a CASE and STUFF and XML to clean things. I like this, thought it’s a semi-complex way of doing things. However, it works.

Has the code aged well? I think it’s OK. There are better ways, as shown with the STUFF/XML version, which wouldn’t have worked in SQL Server 2000. Still, the use of REPLACE is a common technique still used today.

For part 4, with the use of LTRIM and STR(), today we have FORMAT, which is cleaner. However, it’s likely less performant. In a simple test of 500,000 values, the FORMAT takes over 600ms to return the results while my LTRIM/STR combination consistently runs in the 460ms or quicker range.

I think my code aged well.

February 10, 2026
Claude AI Convinced Me Not to Build an iPad App

I coach volleyball and I do a lot of stat stuff on paper. I decided recently to see if I could find a way to more easily automate things. I’ve tried a few apps on the iPad, but they all have too many restrictions and they are hard to use in the heat of the moment. Paper and pencil have been simple, reliable, and they let me fix something easily.

However.

Paper takes some focus, and it’s hard to quickly summarize things. I wanted to make my own app, and Claude convinced me not to do this.

Read on.

This is part of a series of experiments with AI systems.

A Simple Prompt

I’ve been kicking this around, but I never seem to have time. Listening to podcasts, reading articles, and seeing other experiments is slowly getting me to just try things. I started with this prompt, intending to give this 10 minutes out of my day.

how hard is it to build an app for an ipad

I know some of the answers, but you can look at the image below for what Claude gave me.

I like the conversational nature of this, so I answered with this:

a simple app to track some data entry. Can you build an app for an iPad?

I was just looking for help in my thought process here and trying to scope the work. I’m sure Claude Code could knock this out, but I’m experimenting. This was Claude’s response.

That’s great news. I don’t need a native app, and in fact, that’s likely a lot of overhead registering on a store or playing the sideload game, sending updates slowly, etc. With cloud file sync, I could easily have this data available elsewhere anyway.

This is the type of advice I’d get from some friends. Others would relish the chance to build an app and make this more complex. I’ve certainly seen some other Vb coaches on FB create complex systems.

My answer:

volleyball stats. Display a list of players in a 4×3 grid, like the image. Each player’s name is customizable. A date, goal, and time can be entered. For each player, display 4 buttons: 0,1,2,3 which are used to rate a pass. There should be a real time calculation of the average pass score for a player (sum of items/ attempts). Save this to a text file with the datetime data entry was completed.

I meant to upload the image below, but forgot. For context, I print this out and then as kids pass balls, I write 0, 1, 2, 3 for each pass. After we’re done (usually xx passes or time), I quickly compute an average. You can see below, Eliza gets a 3 and Ella gets a 2.

That takes time, so I wondered what Claude would say. This is the response, which took about 5 minutes.

I downloaded the file and opened it and saw this, or most of this. I updated the player names and they’re saved in the HTML.

I can click around and it logs attempts and calculates an average in real time. If I download the data, I get a text report of what happened.

If you want to try it yourself, look in my repo: https://github.com/way0utwest/AIExperiments/tree/main/VolleyballPassingStats

I asked for a few changes, and then I asked for a log of the session. That’s the readme in the repo.

To me, this was something I’ve put off for a few years, not wanting to get caught up in a project like this when I could easily just use paper.

Now I have a new toy that I’ll use at the next practice. Plus, I’ve amazed myself at how easy this was.

Be curious, try things, ask for help on a task or project you’ve put off. GenAI is amazing.

Other AIs

I tried this on a local Gemma3 model and it was very slow and produced a single entry box. to me, this wasn’t worth the time or effort.

I tried this in Copilot (in VS Code) with the Sonnet model, and it wanted to make me an xCode app right away with a SwiftUI. I could get it to produce something like what I got below, but it wasn’t as helpful as Claude.

Video Walkthrough

You can see some of this live in this video.

February 9, 2026