In this last kind of “creative” chapter, I will look at some of the ways you implement common problems in your relational database, and some of the ways you probably shouldn’t. The “should” sections will deal with: Uniqueness – Beyond the simple uniqueness we have covered in the first chapters of the book, looking at some very realistic ...

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 ...

So, it is right there in the title of the book “Relational Database Design” etc (the title is kinda long :)  But as I consider what to cover and, conversely, what not to cover, dimensional design inevitably pops up. So I am considering including it in the book. One thing I try to do is to cover topics to a level where you can start using it ...

A bit of terminology that gets beaten to death is that of the “physical” database.  I would think most every DBA uses this term (I do), but…to mean what?  I think there are two common utilizations: The layer of tables, constraints, indexes, etc used to store data The actual on-disk structures. Frankly, until 3 years ago, I ...