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Ten Common Database Design Mistakes

Ten Common Database Design Mistakes
No list of mistakes is ever going to be exhaustive. People (myself included) do a lot of really stupid things, at times, in the name of “getting it done.” This list simply reflects the database design mistakes that are currently on my mind, or in some cases, constantly on my mind. I have done this topic two times before. Before I start with the list, let me be honest for a minute. So, the list: Poor design/planning Ignoring normalization Poor naming standards Lack of documentation One table to hold all domain values Using identity/guid columns as your only key Not using SQL facilities to protect data integrity Not using stored procedures to access data Trying to build generic objects Lack of testing Poor design/planning “If you don’t know where you are going, any road will take you there” – George Harrison Prophetic words for all parts of life and a description of the type of issues that plague many projects these days. Ignoring Normalization Are there always 12 payments? Maintainability Related:  shiny stuff

Five simple database design tips A flawed database can affect all areas of your application, so getting the design right is of paramount importance. Check out Builder's five simple design tips, and share some of your own. If an enterprise’s data is its lifeblood, then the database design can be the most important part of an application. I’ll get the show started by listing my five favorite tips and giving a brief explanation of the rationale behind each one. #1: Use meaningful field namesI once worked on a project I inherited from another programmer who liked to name fields using the name of the onscreen control that displayed the data from that field. Unless you are using a system that restricts you to short field names, make them as descriptive as possible—within reason, of course. #2: Do your homeworkNot only should you research your business needs when designing a new database, you should check out the existing system, as well. Restrict the user from editing the field after the record’s creation.

What is database Main » TERM » D » By Vangie Beal (1) Often abbreviated DB, a database is basically a collection of information organized in such a way that a computer program can quickly select desired pieces of data. You can think of a database as an electronic filing system. Traditional databases are organized by fields, records, and files. An alternative concept in database design is known as Hypertext. To access information from a database, you need a database management system (DBMS). (2) Increasingly, the term database is used as shorthand for database management system.

database design - Best practices on common person fields (Name, email, address, gender etc...) - Database Administrators My bum is getting sore from sitting on the fence, so I am going to just throw out some answers and hope to not get down-voted into oblivion. Please offer constructive criticism. E-mail Address: min: 6 (a@g.cn) . Or 3 if you want to track local domain email addresses max: 320 254 (RFC) The amount of code to validate an email is actually insane, so let's just assume it's valid if it has a "@" You may want to abstract an email address as a "communication method", so that you can easily list all methods with which to communicate with a user. Gender Gender can change over time, so you could track that if it's important to you. Addresses: NORAM I am gonna take the cheap way out and stick to North American addresses. It is convenient to abstract countries, divisions, cities, and counties mostly due to taxation. GeographicArea: id: int type: {country, division, county, city, indian reservation} name: varchar(45) [1] abbreviation: nullable varchar(4) parent_id: nullable int Address: PartyAddress Names

Unity 3 – April 2013 patterns & practices Developer Center April 2013 Unity is a lightweight, extensible dependency injection container with support for instance and type interception. Overview Unity is a lightweight, extensible dependency injection container with support for constructor, property, and method call injection. Simplified object creation, especially for hierarchical object structures and dependencies. Unity is a general-purpose container for use in any type of Microsoft.NET Framework-based application. In addition, Unity is extensible. This release adds support for Windows Store apps as well as the registration by convention feature to ease the task of configuring Unity. Audience Requirements These reusable components and guidance are intended primarily for software developers and software architects. Contents of This Release Microsoft Unity 3 contains the following: Binaries. System Requirements Supported architectures: x86 and x64. For a rich development environment, the following are recommended:

What are relational databases?" Databases have been a staple of business computing from the very beginning of the digital era. In fact, the relational database was born in 1970 when E.F. Codd, a researcher at IBM, wrote a paper outlining the process. Since then, relational databases have grown in popularity to become the standard. Originally, databases were flat. This means that the information was stored in one long text file, called a tab delimited file. Lname, FName, Age, Salary|Smith, John, 35, $280|Doe, Jane, 28, $325|Brown, Scott, 41, $265|Howard, Shemp, 48, $359|Taylor, Tom, 22, $250 You can see that you have to search sequentially through the entire file to gather related information, such as age or salary. With a relational database, you can quickly compare information because of the arrangement of data in columns. The "relational" part of the name comes into play because of mathmatical relations. Here are some interesting links:

sql - Is there a standard implementation of a Users Database? - Database Administrators Going to have to go for a big old fashion "it depends". Of course you are going to need some sort of key on this table. You could start off with a UserID. This could just be a incrementing INT (or bigint if you are going to have over 2.1 million users). I've seen lots of databases also use GUIDs as the main UserID. You then need to decide how normalized you want your database. I'd keep the main user table to: some sort of ID or PK you can useFirst Name/Last Name or just a usernamesome sort of status of the user (active, disabled, etc) - (tinyint linking to a status table)created date That should be your starting point. From there you could add other columns based on what you want to store. I HIGHLY recommend you read this article though -

c# - Best Practices of fault toleration and reliability for scheduled tasks or services Relational database In the relational model, each table schema must identify a column or group of columns, called the primary key, to uniquely identify each row. A relationship can then be established between each row in the table and a row in another table by creating a foreign key, a column or group of columns in one table that points to the primary key of another table. The relational model offers various levels of refinement of table organization and reorganization called database normalization. (See Normalization below.) The database management system (DBMS) of a relational database is called an RDBMS, and is the software of a relational database. In relational databases, each data item has a row of attributes, so the database displays a fundamentally tabular organization. Relational databases are both created and queried by DataBase Management Systems (DBMSs). Terminology[edit] Relational database terminology. Relations or Tables[edit] Tuples by definition are unique. Base and derived relations[edit]

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