Department of Redundancy Department
Ever wonder all the reasons that we use databases instead of file systems? While we don’t think of it too much anymore, the first reason that databases came into existence was to remove redundancies.
2024-04-12
Database Design
2024-01-05
639 reads
2023-11-27
6,422 reads
Having Data Modeling Standards
Today Steve talks about data modeling and how standards can transfer knowledge between developers.
2023-11-22
517 reads
First Normal Form Gets No Respect
Dr. Codd first described the relational model in a paper in Communications of the ACM (CACM 13 No 6; June 1970). Some more work followed up after that by other people, giving us normal forms and other things we have taken for granted for 50+ years.
2023-10-27
Designing Databases for Distributed Systems
Several data management patterns have emerged for microservices and cloud-native solutions. Learn important patterns to manage data in a distributed environment.
2023-10-18
What Is Good Database Design?
Find out how good database design is essential to ensure data accuracy, consistency, and integrity and that databases are efficient, reliable, and easy to use.
2023-10-16
How Would You Design This: Scheduling Classes
One of the challenges for many database developers is coming up with a good design that not only meets the specifications but also performs well in queries. Relational databases often seek some level of normalization, which reduces the update load for a system but might require more effort work from developers to write queries. Many […]
2023-09-22
2,300 reads
How Would You Design This: Tracking Travels
A fun contest from Steve asks you to design a system that tracks travels for a fictitious business.
2023-08-11
1,752 reads
Combine DATE and TIME to DATETIME2 in SQL Server
The most common method on the internet for combining DATE and TIME columns in SQL Server is incorrect. This article demonstrates why that and other methods are incorrect and two lesser known high performance methods that produce correct results even for the "edge cases".
2023-08-07
25,722 reads
Blogs
Architecting Zero Downtime Deployments–Day of Data Boston
By Steve Jones
Here are the resources for my talk at Day of Data Boston. Slides –...
The Book of Redgate:A Prehistory
By Steve Jones
I’ve covered the values in a number of previous posts on the Book of...
Evidence-bound: what AgentDBA will and won’t link
By Arun Sirpal
When the evidence names the database, it says so. When it doesn’t, it stops....
Forums
Split Large Queries in Athena with a Simple Modulo Trick
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Split Large Queries in Athena...
Finding Trailing Spaces
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Finding Trailing Spaces
Question of the Day
Finding Trailing Spaces
I have some data in a SQL Server 2025 database. It looks like this for the dbo.Customer table:
CustomerID CustomerName PreferredName 1 Steve Steve 2 Andy Andy 3 Brian Brian 4 Allan Allan 5 Devin Devin 6 Steve Steve 7 Sally SallyI want to detect which names have a single trailing space. The CustomerName is a varchar() and the PreferredName is a CHAR(). Does this query detect the problem rows?
SELECT
CustomerID,
CustomerName,
PreferredName
FROM Customer
WHERE CustomerName <> RTRIM(CustomerName)
OR PreferredName <> RTRIM(PreferredName); See possible answers