Everyone knows what a simple database is: Telephone directories, mail-order catalogs and dictionaries are all databases of sorts. Databases can be structured or organized in several different ways: as ...

If you’ve worked with relational database systems for any length of time, you’ve probably participated in a discussion (argument?) about the topic of this month’s column, surrogate keys. A great ...

The original intention of surrogate keys across multidimensional database designs was to help optimize joins by keeping all keys, used for joining between facts and dimensions, both numeric and single ...

Conventional wisdom states that relational databases are not scalable or robust enough to handle the huge numbers of connections, the massive throughput, and all the cool tricks required to master IoT ...

Most any application needs some form of persistence—a way to store the data outside of the application for safekeeping. The most basic way is to write data to the file system, but that can quickly ...

In a world that is all about new apps and cloud computing, sometimes the important stuff doesn’t look new or cool. Sometimes key small business tools are just functional, they might have been around a ...

Most database startups avoid building relational databases, since that market is dominated by a few goliaths. Oracle, MySQL and Microsoft SQL Server have embedded themselves into the technical fabric ...