As the book progresses, I find myself veering from the original stated outline quite a bit, because as I teach about this more (and I am teaching a daylong db design class in August at http://www.sqlsolstice.com/… shameless plug, but it is on topic :) I start to find that a given order works better. Originally I had slated myself to talk more ...

Assuming all goes as planned, I will be in Columbus, OH this Friday night and Saturday for SQL Saturday 75. I really love SQL Saturday events the best of all of the events because they are very intimate in nature. As a fairly antisocial person, I sometimes get overwhelmed by the size of other events, even the SQL Rally was just barely in my ...

A while back, I was working on a short article about Normalization for a book that never got published (admittedly I wasn’t getting paid for the article, and it wasn’t for charity, so I wasn’t that broken up over it.)  The task at hand was to, in 2 pages or less, describe the process of normalization and help you to know when you have ...

Today, SQLServerCentral republished the first article in my Test-Driven Database Development series: An Example of Test-Driven Database Development. (Thanks SSC!)

Beside my BI workshop on Friday, this year at PASS Summit I’ll also contribute by participating at the Birth Of Feather Lunch on a very hot topic: “SQL Server and the NoSQL Alternatives” I’ve been watching closely the NoSQL movement right from the beginning (as soon as it started to grow also in Italy, so from January 2010), since I simply love ...

Introduction Buck Woody (Blog - @BuckWoody) recently blogged about his Database Design Process and I see Grant Fritchey has a (Blog - @GFritchey) post on the same topic. I figured I'd throw my two cents into the mix. ADD I often joke that I practice ADD (Andy-Driven Design... what'd you think I meant?). I'm expecting a ...

I'm honored to present Database Design for Developers to the Southern Maryland .Net Users Group! I'll be there Monday evening, 14 Dec 2009, and the meeting starts at 6:30. If you read this blog and attend, be sure to introduce yourself! :{> Andy

As I have mentioned in all of the previous posts, basic functionality is the foundation of any system. So it goes without saying that if you have just implemented a payroll system, everyone is getting paid.  To meet the basic bar that EVERYONE agrees upon, to be useful things have to work. Frankly, this is generally the only criteria which ...

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 ...

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 ...