Been There, Done That, Sent it to Production

I admit I ripped off the last part of that title. I heard it at the Access 14 Developers' Kitchen in Redmond a couple of weeks ago. One of the presenters had the all-too familiar experience of having a bug pop up in the middle of his demo. It turned out to be one of those trivial things that we all do from time to time and it was quickly fixed. While he was tweaking his code, several audience members called out variations of the familiar "Been There, Done That". Then after an appropriate pause, Doug Yudovich added his version, "Been There, Done That, Sent It to Production." In a moment of universal recognition, everyone in the room sighed and nodded in agreement.

Normalization for Normal People -- How Much is That Doggie in the WIndow?

Many, perhaps even most, databases involve tracking one or more kinds of transactions. That's because, in a general sense, a transaction is more than the exchange of goods for money. Purchases, of course, are transactions, and we can start our investigation of transactions by looking at the components of a purchase as a way to get to an understanding of how transactions work and how the database must be designed to handle them. Next time I'll try to expand that to non-sales transactions.

A Change is as Good as a Rest

...or so the saying goes.

Well, a lot of things have changed for me, and are still changing, but so far I'm still waiting for the rest part. Maybe next week.

Normalization for Normal People, "How Long Has This Been Going On and Who Else is Involved?"

There is just a bit of irony in the title to today's installment. The cynical answer might be "Way too long already, dude. You've been talking about attributes for WEEKS now." That's true, but it's a fascinating topic and there is still a bit more to be said, so I'm going to say it. This week I'm also going to shift gears and bring a description of physical table structure into the discussion.

Normalization for Normal People, Part I--The "Language" of the Database, Installment Four

After such a lengthy break I feel I should do a quick review of previous thoughts on the language of the database and how it impacts the way we design our tables.

As I see it, the language of relational databases has three components:

Nouns
Adjectives
Verbs