Recoverability Trumps Performance By Craig Mullins Many DBAs reading this article will look at the title and immediately think I’m wrong… at least initially. They’ll claim that managing performance is the most important thing they do, but they are confusing frequency with importance. Yes, DBAs confront performance issues more often than they build backup plans – and they better be...

Data Administration versus Database Administration By Craig S. Mullins What is data administration (DA) and what does it have to do with database administration (DBA)? Well, in this day and age, the term “data administration” is not used nearly as commonly as it was just a few years ago. Instead, we hear terms like data governance or data architecture. But...

Database Design: From Logical to Physical By Craig S. Mullins A proper database design cannot be thrown together quickly by novices. What is required is a practiced and formal approach to gathering data requirements and modeling data. This modeling effort requires a formal approach to the discovery and identification of entities and data elements. Data normalization is a big part...

The Ever-Changing Role of the DBA by Craig S. Mullins Defining the job of DBA is getting to be increasingly difficult. Oh, most people know the rudimentary aspects of the job, namely keeping your organization’s databases and applications running up to par. The DBA has to be the resident DBMS expert (whether that is DB2, Oracle or SQL Server, or...

Denormalization Techniques for Relational Databases By Craig S. Mullins Speeding the retrieval of data from relational tables is a frequent requirement for DBAs and performance analysts. One way to accomplish this is to denormalize the tables. The opposite of normalization, denormalization is the process of putting one fact in many places. This speeds data retrieval at the expense of data...