Maurice has been a regular contributor to my column with insightful responses and helpful tips. Today Maurice responds to the topic of Master Data Management. He writes: Duplicate Data is expensive in development costs. If the data would have the same structure everywhere replication mechanism would reduce costs, but often you see duplicate data attributes associated in several ways with […]

The cost of dirty data is difficult to assess. Mike comments in yesterday’s editorial with a number of costs that can arise as a result of poorly managed data. Probably the biggest cost is the reputation of your company and its data assets. If you have multiple records for the same information it may be counted multiple times, skew summary […]

No matter if you intentionally shard data or simply have multiple packsystems for managing your business it is highly probably that you have multiple copies of the same information. Your accounting system has accounts payable and accounts receivable, each most likely having customer or vendor information. You could also have your sales system, or warehousing system with overlapping data. Perhaps […]

Data is one of those resources that tends to stick around long after its usefulness has diminished or been depleted completely. In my observation this is because it isn’t too expensive to keep around, and it many of the technique for reducing the cost or retention require a redesign of your systems to move or access it. Often times nothing […]

Nulls in a database have been an area of contention since they were first available and implemented. The primary purpose of null as originally designed was as a placeholder where no value was available. In the case of true/false null provided a tertiary value of unknown, or undefined. You will get a lot of helpful information about null and how […]

In my experience it is better for developers who do not understand database connection pooling to not use it than to use it incorrectly. In many of the new frameworks this is handled for you, the creating and tearing down of connections, and the return of a closed connection object to the connection pool. In those instances when you roll […]

Here’s a real world scenario that database administrators face on a regular basis. Your application moves along smoothly; the amount of disk space increased incrementally each day. Then, all off a sudden, your database disk allocation jumps 20% or more with no apparent reason. Do you simply acquire more disk space, or do you find out if perhaps you need […]

I have been reading a lot recently about how to have secure passwords. With the capabilities of many of the newer GPUs the ability to protect an encrypted password is diminishing daily. It has been understood that it would take a super computer a year to hack a single password with all the different permutations available. Today that has been […]

How do we get the performance we have come to expect from Google? Data and Workload are distributed across a large fabric of small computers. The sum of the whole results in performance greater than that of a super computer. Google has proven the architecture of Scaling Out with dramatic performance at an amazingly low cost. More and more systems […]

Moving away from rational databases as a data storage technique may have its own set of problems to solve. For example, what do you do when you have two collections of data with a common attribute (like a foreign key in a relational database) on which you join the two sets, resulting in a new set of data with attributes […]