When I started blogging here on sqlblog.com, I intended to write about stuff like T-SQL, performance, and such; but also about data modeling and database design. In reality, the latter has hardly happened so far – but I will try to change that in the future. Starting off with this post, in which I will pose (and attempt to answer) the rather ...

''My name is Andy Leonard. I tweet.'' ''Hi Andy, we love you.'' It's true, I am a bona fide Twitter-holic. If you use the service you may have noticed disruptions lately. Frank La Vigne (recently married - congratulations Frank!) blogged about it. The Twitter developers are blogging about it. And they have raised the ire of Mr. Scoble, who ...

Kevin Hazzard did an outstanding job presenting to the Richmond SQL Server Users Group this evening on LINQ To SQL! I really like the ORM / code generation aspects of this new feature of the .Net Framework 3.5. Seeing it in action made me yearn (a little) for my application developer days. Kevin's VPC crashed a couple hours before his ...

Introduction: The World Series (1979) and Photography Willie ''Pops'' Stargell started my interest in photography (...a funny way to start a post on a SQL Server blog site, but bear with me). Pops Stargell led the 1979 Pittsburgh Pirates to win the World Series. He was the MVP that year as well. My Mom, in the only time I ever remember her ...

Introduction      There's quite a bit of hoopla about MDM lately, mostly due to awareness. While ''Lacks needed data'' was cited as the number 1 problem (with 21 votes) in data warehouses in the recent IBM Data Warehousing Satisfaction Survey (2007), ''Insufficient or inadequate master data'' made a decent showing ...

A friend (who shall remain nameless) recently told me his company interviewed a competent database developer and DBA. All seemed in agreement an offer would be forthcoming until the very end of the recruiting process. At that time, someone made the comment ''we don't need a DBA.'' It would be notable if this sentiment wasn't so widespread - ...

Starts out like this: ''I’ve been designing relational databases since the mid 80’s. My conclusion is that the relational model is weak and lacking. Specifically, the foreign key – that simple DRI constraint which is the keystone of the relational model - is insufficient. The model poorly represents reality.'' Now, I should note before you ...

I have been struggling to find a way to describe the fundamentals of first normal form for my PASS presentation, and this came to mind last night.  SQL works in a very constructive way, meaning that if you have base values (commonly referred to as atomic, or scalar values) then you can build up the view that you want.  However, have ...

Oh no, you may be thinking, he has gone off the deep end.  Preparing for his talk on normalization at PASS this year he has finally cracked and said ''to heck with it, just denormalize...'' If you thought that, shame on you, and minus 10 points for you.  No, there is one very prominent place where most any database architect will tell ...