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 ...

A database that maintains a set of separate, related files (tables), but combines data elements from the files for queries and reports when required. The concept was developed in 1970 by Edgar Codd, ...

If you want to know what’s what in Big Data analytics today, you’ve got to know the basics of NoSQL databases, and how appropriate NoSQL databases facilitate Big Data analytics. What are the most ...

The real nugget in the post is “the whole point of seeking alternatives is that you need to solve a problem that relational databases are a bad fit for.” Adam Keys in his The Real Adam blog post ...

Key-value, document-oriented, column family, graph, relational… Today we seem to have as many kinds of databases as there are kinds of data. While this may make choosing a database harder, it makes ...

Often one reads a book or hears a presenter making a pun about relational theory being called “relational” because of entities being “related.” Such references are nothing but misplaced puns.

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 ...