10 things to review after finishing your data model
When I finish modeling my database, I like to just let it sit a couple days, then spend some time just reviewing it to check for inconsistencies. The kind of inconsistencies you never notice when you’re up to your eyeballs in details, but drive you up the wall after 5 years of maintenance. When I finished my database design a few days ago, I jotted a few things down to remember to do. But when I... read moreHow to enforce a foreign key constraint against multiple tables
6 simple steps to a stress free database change deployment
… Deployments can be a real headache at the best of times, but especially when schema updates to a production database are involved. Don’t get me wrong, you usually have a backup to fall back on, but how long will that take to restore? … Really, you don’t want to resort to the restore, have the database offline for that long, or have your name associated to it. So gradually I evolved a process which has kept me sane and confident when deploying schema changes to production servers, even on large, sensitive, and active databases….
read moreHow To Get The Most Frequently Used Column Values
Whenever I import external data, integrate to another database, or am new to a project, I need to get familiar with the database. The table schemas, relational integrity, and constraints are the first thing I look at and take me a long way, but soon I need to know what the data looks like.
In an ideal world, relational integrity and database constraints would define control this, and all I’d really need to do is look at those. But the reality is, in 15 years of working in this industry, most of the databases I’ve worked on, that I didn’t design, have barely used constraints and some haven’t even used relation integrity fully!
The need to get a good feel of the data is even more prevalent when working with dirty data, or when refactoring poorly written applications to ensure any refactoring doesn’t introduce other issues. I will usually wind up writing the following query repeatedly:
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Senior Software Consultant working in the Toronto area. I specialize in Microsoft technologies and have a long history of taking software development projects from idea, through development and implementation, and years of maintenance.
Always looking for interesting projects. 