Tag Archives: database design

Singular or Plural

Posted on December 8, 2017 by

There are all sorts of interesting debates that developers will have about programming. One of those I’ve written about in the past is Spaces v Tabs. There’s a lot of discussion about that one, and certainly no share of strong opinions. … Continue reading →

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The Relational Database is the Default

Posted on December 7, 2017 by

It seems that I regularly meet people in the SQL community that are asked about moving their datastore to a NoSQL type of database. In a mature system, that might be a conversation worth having, especially if there are issues … Continue reading →

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A Database Design Test

Posted on June 30, 2017 by

I was watching a presentation recently on database design and the speaker talked about how he hires developers. These are full stack developers, for whom the database is a portion of their responsibility. One of the tasks he gives them … Continue reading →

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Null Defaults

Posted on March 3, 2017 by

One of the things that becomes important in a distributed, team environment is the interface that you present to other systems. In a Devops environment, we really need to have an API for every system, including the database. This means a … Continue reading →

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Making Complex Table Changes

Posted on August 8, 2016 by

Tables are a problem for anyone trying to grow and modify software. Views, stored procedures, functions, all of these objects are easy to modify, but when we start to deal with actual data, where we need to maintain state, we … Continue reading →

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Email or Username

Posted on June 29, 2016 by

Quite a few of us will work with application databases where we need to identify a particular user for working with the various parts of the application. I’m not talking about the authentication and verification of identity, but just having … Continue reading →

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Have You Designed a Database from Scratch?

Posted on June 24, 2016 by

One of the things that I try to regularly promote is the #SQLNewBlogger project from Ed Leighton-Dick (and #SQLNewBlogger hashtag on Twitter). In keep a column open scanning for the tag and try to respond to those that post. I … Continue reading →

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The Clustered Index is not the Primary Key

Posted on May 24, 2016 by

I was reading through a list of links for Database Weekly and ran across this script from Pinal Dave, looking for tables where the clustered index isn’t the PK. It struck me that this is one of those facts I … Continue reading →

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Naming Is Hard

Posted on April 7, 2016 by

I ran across Aaron Bertrand’s naming post recently, which I liked overall. Your team needs to agree how things are named, and be consistent, but I agree that some of the rules I’ve seen put down by people aren’t practical. However I also … Continue reading →

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Relational By Default

Posted on November 18, 2015 by

I’ve read a few pieces from Vladimir Khorikov and I tend to like the thoughtful way in which he approaches building software. When I saw a link to his SQL v NoSQL databases, I was intrigued to see what his thoughts would … Continue reading →

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