If you haven’t seen the comments from yesterday’s editorial, there is some really good insight. AZ Jim provides a good case for requirements first design in a Waterfall methodology. If you are doing waterfall development, he has it right on. Requirements, logical model, physical model, begin coding. This works extremely well, and has proven success to the same degree of […]

Is it the size or quantity that matters, when it comes to creating a good database diagram? I prefer both. That may be a little bit of ego, age, and efficiency all rolled into one. I really like the big screen. With the recent Ultra HD 4 TVs that are now available, you can get a reasonable resolution that looks […]

What should we really be doing in triggers? Are triggers inherently bad?. Or, are they bad because a trigger is misused? I suppose it is like asking if a person is bad, or if a person has made bad choices. So, what are good things that can be done with triggers? Triggers are great for when you are making changes […]

Do you have a complicated query you’re finding it difficult to get your head around? I have found that using Common Table Expressions (CTE) can take some of the pain away, and maybe even improve performance. A common table expression performs much like an inline view. It does not have a permanent definition stored in the database schema, as views […]

It seems like the database systems I’ve been working on are getting bigger and bigger. I remember the days when a 100 gigabyte database was considered large. Today, a terabyte sized database is not uncommon. Are we saving that much more information, or is there something else going on. Well, for one thing, if you are using SQL Server, the […]

Much like SQL Server embraced native storage of XML data, Postgresql has embraced native storage of JSON. The benefits and detriments are identical. It can be used and/or abused. JSON is much more popular with the Java community than XML data notation. It is not as easy to read as XML, but remains very flexible. More significant, is the fact […]

One of the reasons we tend to build SQL statements in our application code is because it is difficult to sort the results using different fields. You have at least a couple solutions to this scenario, if you wish to use stored procedures. Do not sort the data in the stored procedure; sort the results in the application Modify your […]

Where Does Responsibility Land with a Data Breach? I read an article today, the first of these that I had then seen posted on the AP wire site. Essentially, there has been a massive, comprehensive data breach of systems containing all sorts of information – personally identifiable in the most damaging ways – for current and past federal employees. We’re […]

As a follow on to yesterday’s editorial, "SQL Injection is Still Alive", I want to provide some quick tips on how to protect against SQL Injection. The first thing you need to do is get rid of code that builds SQL Statements by concatenating commands with user input. The reason was demonstrated yesterday. If your source engine is SQL Server, […]

I heard this last week about an application that was attached by SQL Injection. The application wasn’t very old. I’m quite surprised at this turn of events. How SQL Injection works is well documented all over the web. Ways to exploit SQL databases through injection are simple. Blocking SQL Injection is simple as well. This is a topic I have […]