Before I get started with the pillars of a well built database, I want to reply (in long form) to a comment on the last post. I see the phases of the project to have five distinct phases (again trying to make memorable lists that an stick in your mind): Requirements – The process of extracting what needs to be done from the mind of the people ...

As I am starting the process of writing my next edition of the database design book (over the next 3+ years) I am starting to try to come up with some catchy way of stating that a database is well designed and implemented.  So I started to think of some metaphor and pillars is the best I could do. Catchy? Dunno, but the idea is that without ...

As I have been walking around Disney World this week, my mind starts to wander to matters of database design. Sad, perhaps, but I will guess that most people who read this blog do the same much the same thing with whatever technology they are good at when they are relaxing also.  It also may actually have helped me come up with an example for ...

As I am easing back into real life from writing the book, I am in search of easy targets for blogging.  My boss mentioned this blog over on Jeff Atwood's Coding Horror Blog and it got me thinking about commenting.  His advice is to only comment "why" the code works.  I can't quite agree, because the code he claims to be ...

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      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 ...

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 ...