"I'm seeing more [data] professionals implementing the following type of conditional unique constraints, typically related to the use of 'soft deletes'):

TABLEX (SK,A,B,C,ACT_FLAG)

Uniqueness is defined for (A,B) iff ACT_FLAG='Yes'. Any row with a ACT_FLAG = 'No' is excluded from the unique requirement."

"Most SQL DB implementations I know of do not allow this type of constraint to be enforced declaratively. Instead it relies on tricks within the index specification for enforcement."

"This conditional application of unique constraints troubles me. The prevalent use of a surrogate primary key avoids duplicates in the table as a whole. But this approach seems to declare a business rule that can be turned off and on based on the value of a non-key column. It definitely feels there is more than one kind of business entity here -- but they do share the same attributes. I also see a similar design pattern when OO classes are mapped to a table during implementation (when the implementation approach is to combine classes into a single table and an attempt is made to enforce two types of 'uniqueness'."

"However, I cannot definitively find a specific rule/guideline within relational theory that it violates. I know there are design alternatives. The fact that there is no true always-on business key other than the surrogate key IS an issue, but the fact that technically the surrogate PK prevents duplicates is almost always presented as a counter argument."

"To the question “How relevant is data modeling in the world of NoSQL?” I give the following answer.

The main purpose of data modeling is to understand the business, some application domain, some users world. The model becomes a representation of that world -- the "things" in it, the relationships among those things and any constraints on those things or relationships. A secondary purpose is to build a database to contain information which pertains to and describes that domain."

"Generally we speak of the model coming first, then the implementation, and finally, the data gets collected and stored according to the model. Hence, the business data model should not be concerned with issues of physical stored representation, or the transformations/manipulations/constraints which are imposed to facilitate implementation in some data (storage) management system. That could be a relational DBMS, or a NoSQL tool".

" ... increasingly the data already exists in some form. Which leaves us with the task of figuring out what it means, what it represents -- that is, understanding the data as it represents some user domain. NoSQL tools are often designed to deal with existing data and to process it more efficiently (that may be an oversimplification!). Either way, you must understand the business in order to make sense of the data." 

--Gordon Everest, LinkedIn.com

"You constantly remind us that the relational model is a logical model having no connection to any physical model (so I infer). You also indicate how no commercial product fully implements the relational model. Therefore, how do we make use of the relational model when dealing with the physical constructs of a commercial database program (Oracle, Access, DB2, etc.)?" --DBDebunk.com

"You constantly remind us that the relational model is a logical model having no connection to any physical model (so I infer). You also indicate how no commercial product fully implements the relational model. Therefore, how do we make use of the relational model when dealing with the physical constructs of a commercial database program (Oracle, Access, DB2, etc.)?" --DBDebunk.com query