Follow @DBDebunk Follow @ThePostWest

1.

I will give a presentation for the San Francisco SQL Server User Group:

Follow @DBDebunk Follow @ThePostWest

In Why SQL Is Not Suited for the Cloud and What Is NuoDB, one Aswin writes:

In the data world, SQL is a relation-based, data model, and the most common means used to retrieve and manipulate data. Predicates, clauses, expressions and queries that are all used in SQL data management system have made it abundantly popular and user friendly. But this traditional data management system suffers serious of limitations...

Follow @DBDebunk Follow @ThePostWest

1.
My latest column Why Managers Need Business Models (my original title was Modeling and Usefulness).

2.
I am working on a European tour in the March-April time frame. UK will probably be included. Those interested in organizing seminars and/or presentations, or know somebody who might be, please contact me.

Have a nice weekend.

Follow @DBDebunk Follow @ThePostWest

WS: I have a question. I have been asked about the possibility of teaching a SQL course. My audience will be people from a scientific rather than an IT background (which I think will make my job easier). If the training does take place then obviously in my own material I will cover the basics of the relational model before moving on to SQL. One of them has asked me if there is a book I can recommend on the subject to get them started. Now although I own a lot of books about the relational model and about SQL they contain mainly quite advanced material, I don't know of an introductory book about SQL that is theoretically sound. I wonder if you can recommend one? ... I haven't seen anything that I am particularly enthusiastic about. I would say it is a gap in the market, though unfortunately the market probably demands books about Oracle, Sql Server or MySQL. That is, of course, true of trade media and book publishers too.

Follow @DBDebunk Follow @ThePostWest


tblIsThere, The Daily WTF

Follow @DBDebunk Follow @ThePostWest

Until the rise of nosql solutions, you would force-fit all data and relations into traditional RDBMS model and then do a fire dance in the application layer to manage them. In other words, you would force a cube into a cylinder with enough force that it fits. With nosql solutions, that is not necessary, so you can pick the right solution based on the problem domain. If your data is largely schemaless, there is no point in forcing it into a relational table with most of the columns being null, so a document oriented DB such as MongoDB or CouchDB would be ideal. If you dealing with lists, sets, queues etc., which need to be persisted, then Redis maybe an ideal candidate. If you are managing key/values then Cassandra maybe your choice. Of course, you don't want to have a dozen of these in your system, but a careful use of RDBMS and nosql solutions would greatly simplify application design.
--Have any NoSQL databases become viable replacements for SQL databases yet?, quora.com

Follow @DBDebunk Follow @ThePostWest

See the rewrite

What Is a True Relational System (and What It Is Not)