The ABCs of Database Creation

Creating SQL Server databases is easier than the internet may lead us to believe.

How to get Database Design Horribly Wrong

Database Design is one of those tasks where you have to carefully get all the major aspects right. If you mess-up just one of these, it can all go horribly wrong. So what are these aspects that can ruin database design, and how can you get them right? Robert Sheldon explains.

Defusing Database Time Bombs: Avoiding the Need to Refactor Databases

Where applications are evolved by gradually molding them to a growing understanding of the business domain, this presents great challenges to database development. If databases are designed too loosely, and initial errors are allowed to fester, the results become harder and harder to refactor until eventually they constitute a database time bomb. Thomas LeBlanc describes how to avoid a few basic, but very common, database time bombs.

Is a foreign key constraint an index? If not, is an index automatically created in order to enforce it?

Is a Primary Key an index?

EAV

Relational Model versus XML

XML index

Foreign key

Physical Database Design Consideration

There are lots of things to think about when you design a physical database. What data types should I use? What column is appropriate for the primary key? Are there particular indexes that I should use to improve performance? How should I implement data integrity rules? This list goes on and on. In this article Greg Larsen will be exploring different physical database design elements.