How did this happen I think I may actually like SQL Server now? I remember a few years back when I used to grumble about writing a SQL query that included a JOIN. For some reason back then I could never get my head around JOINs. Today is a totally different story. I wrote a deployment script that did the following:...

I have been recently working on a database that hasn’t been designed but has been hacked together by lots of people over the years. It started life as an Microsoft Access database created by my director to keep track of all the projects that our company does. It was not much more than one table listing everything. At...

One of my jobs is adding extra features to our internal databases. There is a fair amount of risk in doing this. I could make a change to one of the queries in the database that stops the rest of the company using it as they need to. This could be a costly mistake, almost as bad as the database server being...

I saw this tweet on twitter. He’s making a database, He’s filtering twice SELECT * FROM customers WHERE behaviour = Nice Santa Clause is Coming to town. This started me thinking surely in a normalized database structure behaviour wouldn’t be stored in the customer table, so I propose the following change. He’s making a...

Let’s continue looking at a database schema for storing details of every Star Trek Episode. If you are new to databases, a schema is just the design of the structure of the database. We have three tables, Episode, EpisodeWriter and Writer. See my last post for more details of these. It has been suggested that a slight...

My last post proved quite popular so I am wondering if I can combine a post about IT and Star Trek. Years ago I used to have lists of Star Trek episodes, which included such information like original air date, production number, episode title and brief description. One thing that was hard to keep track of was how many...