I can remember a time when there was a lot of debate regarding what data engine should be used. Se should use Oracle if we want to be able to scale, or handle heavy loads. We should use Sybase because it runs on different hardware. We should use SQL Server because it is much less expensive per seat, or calculation. […]

There’s another database engine entering the already full market place. Cockroach DB will surely get your attention, simply by the name. What makes this new data engine different? Why would you consider it? At the root, Cockroach DB is a distributed database engine. Data is highly scalable, to petabytes and more through the implementation of a fabric composed of multiple […]

I’d like to make one more posting on the topic of business rules, summarizing some of the different thoughts. In reality, business rules appear in just about any layer. Here are some examples. User entry validation may often be implemented in the User Experience. It can reside in a browser as JavaScript, in a GUI application as a control, or […]

Yesterday, one of our readers put the pressure on me by asking, “What are business rules?” What a great question. I’m not sure I have the best answer. But, I’d like to give it some effort, with the desire for others to comment, to keep me honest, and share their own perspective. I would say that the simplest rules are […]

I’ve been an advocate of centralizing all business rules in the database for 20+ years. Working with some extremely talented individuals the following 10 years I have been convinced that storing business rules on the database is not the only viable option, and does not have to be the best performing one. In the last 6 years I was the […]

mI know I’m going to upset a lot of folks who have been programming database systems for a long time. So, just be prepared. I’m linking together a lot of thoughts from previous editorials, and reader contributions, to suggest reasoning for a current trend. Let me start with the assertion, and then we’ll see if we can validate it reasonably. […]

Recently, l have been reviewing a database design that made me feel like I have a flash back to 1990. Every table used a polish notation like prefix for every table of “tbl”. I remember when we used to use the prefix in order to differentiate a view from a table for the consumer. However, as we look at reasons […]

I had a lot of input from many of you regarding naming conventions for the primary key of a table. One thing that was common in all of the replies, either written explicitly, or implicitly, was that consistency matters. If you have a convention, regardless of what it is, and always use it in all of your databases, it is […]

I had a conversation, recently, with a number of colleagues, all seasoned professionals, with differing opinions on naming conventions for primary keys in tables. Many held the position that a primary key should only be named Id. Others felt the primary key should be named using the table name followed by Id. The persons holding to the Id position felt […]

Back in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, when data warehousing was a new and growing concept, things were wild and crazy. Even then, using traditional tools such as Cognos, it was important to have a good understanding and structuring of your data in order to have reliable, performant, data mining. Many data warehousing projects failed, because they could not […]