Never look a gift horse in the mouth, especially if there are many of them running in parallel… There are various structures we can use in a data warehouse – each with its pros and cons. For example, if you use a relational structure for the core of the warehouse then you gain very high flexibility but lose out on speed. …

The Great Pyramid of Giza is the sole survivor of the Seven Wonders of the World. An Arab proverb says that: "Man fears time, yet time fears the Pyramids", a reference to the fact that the pyramid has survived for about 4,500 years and, in that time, has lost a mere 10 metres off its incredible 145 metre height. Composed of two …

This is a great example of a myth/legend that is both true and false; it all depends on how you define relational. Ted Codd produced one of the first attempts to define exactly what the term relational Database Management System (DBMS) means. Since Dr. Edgar Codd is regarded as ‘the Father of the Relational Database’, most …

Press releases issued by software companies are one of the more common sources of myths and legends in the database world. No real surprise there you may think but therein lies a paradox. We all know that press releases are highly partisan, so we expect everyone to treat them with suspicion; yet we aren’t surprised when they …

Access dominates the PC platform and, over the years, has been used to create vast numbers of departmental databases. In their turn, many of these have slowly become mission critical and now need to be upgraded to a secure client-server engine. In Microsoft's grand plan for world domination, it would prefer that engine to be …

In the second myths and legends story we related how the knights of the Good King Bill were accused of stealing secrets from Borland at a conference way back in 1992. In fact, the knights involved turned out to be most courtly and honourable; the accusations demonstrably and provably false. However, another myth surrounds that …

My esteemed colleague on Reg Developer, Martin Banks, has argued that do-it-yourself BI (Business Intelligence) is a trend worth watching: As he said… “The premise being put forward by companies looking to move into DIYBI is that BI so far is only being performed by the largest enterprises, and then only by white-coated rocket …

At Tech Ed this summer, Microsoft talked about a new product that brings application lifecycle management to database development. Application lifecycle management has been around for years allowing application developers to check code out from a central repository and enjoy the luxury of knowing that they are the only …

BI (Business Intelligence) is about extracting information from data and data mining is an important part of that process. Data mining is a process that looks for patterns in data, so in a sense it is like querying the data. The crucial differences between simply querying the data and data mining can be summed up as intent and …

A data model is a methodology for storing, handling and manipulating data. There are lots of them around. One of the most commonly employed at present is the relational model. Brainchild of Edgar Codd, it rapidly came into favour after he published his seminal paper in 1970. Many of the popular database engines today (for …

Increasingly developers are required to write applications that interact with database engines – typically Oracle, SQL Server, DB2, MySQL or Access. In many ways the database engine is pretty much immaterial; no matter what the flavour it’s still simply a matter of tables, columns, rows and a variety of data types; text, memo, …

I use a computer of course, but only for fun. I'm certainly not a guru. So when people started talking about "spyware" I was a little confused. It sounded like a virus, but it clearly wasn't. No problem, I visited a site that I trust (Microsoft.com) and found a very nice lady there (in a video, of course) who told me all about …

"Microsoft was caught stealing secrets from Borland.". Or was it? Of course, this all happened way, way back in 1992; but then myths are supposed to be old; that’s the whole point. And this one just won't lie down and die. Every so often someone tells me that, before Access was released, somewhere in a secret desert location, …

The one advantage of delivering an uninspiring keynote is that it is very unlikely to inspire a myth or legend that I can later have fun imploding, but that was the task that seemed to be set for Bob Muglia and Ray Ozzie at the Microsoft TechED keynote here in Boston. It was short on technology and long on promises; with a …

Most companies have a tame "guru" - someone presented as a world authority on the subject in question and so amazingly intelligent that they are above the tacky world of commercialism. Sadly, many such "gurus" merely debase the term and turn out to be exactly what you expect - mouthpieces for the marketing department. Photo …

The database world has more myths and legends than the court of King Arthur. The current myths tend to be less about dragons and dungeons and more about features and performance, such as: Oracle can't do MOLAP. Oracle is as easy to tune as a cathedral organ. DB2 only runs on mainframes. SQL Server doesn't scale. Oracle is …

According to (the normally more readable) Wikipedia, Master Data Management (MDM) “focuses on the management of reference or master data that is shared by several disparate IT systems and groups. MDM is required to warrant consistent computing between diverse system architectures and business functions”. Great. An example may …

There’s a large and obvious hole in Microsoft’s line-up of functionality in SQL Server 2005: Analysis Services is a solid multi-dimensional database engine but Microsoft offers no means of graphically displaying the data it handles. The need for such tools increases hugely when dealing with multi-dimensional data: users are …

Organisations are rarely short of data, but the information it contains is often elusive. Business Intelligence (BI) gives the business user an amazing tool: it turns data into information, making BI an area of huge growth and one where skilled developers are in short supply. It is worth knowing the job roles in a standard BI …

The eye-catching headline above recently appeared in a press release from “business data specialists ICS". What!? A scandal in the moral world of BI? Surely not. It turns out that the burden of ICS's song is that it has a product that "puts information in the hands of the user rather than confined to business analysts away from …

Business Intelligence (BI) is an umbrella term for systems and processes that turn a mass of opaque data into useful business information. SQL Server 2005 incorporates radical changes into its BI capabilities. UDM BI typically involves the construction of a data warehouse which pulls together disparate data held in different …

DB2 is the most respectable and most powerful database engine in the world: it’s the pinnacle of database development. IBM makes a claim (undisputed to my knowledge) that more structured data is stored in DB2 than in any other database engine. Certainly, according to the Winter Corporation’s 2005 survey, the largest OLTP (On- …

Normally, the history of software is about as alluring as last night’s curry but in this case, it’s relevant because it is precisely this history that is at the root of SQL Server’s main problem. The product was originally Sybase by any other name; Microsoft simply bought the source code and re-badged it. Sadly, even in its …

High availability can be provided in various ways – SQL Server 2005 supports mirroring, fail-over clustering and backup log shipping. Backup log shipping is the simplest and cheapest high availability system and appears in the workgroup edition of SQL Server 2005 and above. Essentially, it means the shipping of the transaction …

T-SQL is Microsoft’s own version of SQL. Like most database companies, Microsoft supports most of the standards and extends the standards where it feels there is a lack. So, SQL Server 2005 supports almost all of the ANSI 99 and 2003 SQL standards. As Euan Garden, product unit manager for SQL Server Tools, said back in 2004: " …

Well, I’m convinced. The enterprise edition can, within the constraints of the operating system, run databases of unlimited size than use unlimited RAM on any number of CPUs. It supports 64-bit operation, partitioning and parallel index operations. Still smarting under its history, Microsoft has put together a range of …

Microsoft, of course, provides some DBA management tools but there are also 3rd. party tools available (for both modelling and management) from companies such as Embarcadero and BMC. ® Return to Page 1 of main article here - otherwise use "back" button.

SQL Server is a client-server based, relational database engine. That puts it head-to-head with the likes of IBM’s DB2 and Oracle’s Oracle… or so Microsoft dearly wants us to believe. The problem is that, while DB2 and Oracle are unquestionably enterprise-level products, SQL server has for years been dogged by the suspicion …