All Questions
Tagged with sqldatabase-design
132 questions
101votes
9answers
27kviews
Is it ever okay to use lists in a relational database?
I've been trying to design a database to go with a project concept and ran into what seems like a hotly debated issue. I've read a few articles and some Stack Overflow answers that state it's ...
- 951
54votes
8answers
20kviews
Is the use of NoSQL Databases impractical for large datasets where you need to search by content?
I've been learning about NoSQL Databases for a week now. I really understand the advantages of NoSQL Databases and the many use cases they are great for. But often people write their articles as if ...
53votes
8answers
15kviews
Is domain driven design an anti-SQL pattern?
I am diving in the domain driven design (DDD) and while I go more deeply in it there are some things that I don't get. As I understand it, a main point is to split the Domain Logic (Business Logic) ...
49votes
2answers
28kviews
Why store flags/enums in a database as strings instead of integers?
I've been browsing SQL dumps of some famous CMSes, including Drupal 7, Wordpress (some quite very old version), and some custom application based on Python. All of these dumps contained data with ...
- 2,416
43votes
3answers
50kviews
self referencing tables, good or bad? [closed]
Representing geographical locations within an application, the design of the underlying data model suggests two clear options (or maybe more?). One table with a self referencing parent_id column uk - ...
- 4,670
31votes
4answers
10kviews
Why many designs ignore normalization in RDBMS?
I got to see many designs that normalization wasn't the first consideration in decision making phase. In many cases those designs included more than 30 columns, and the main approach was "to put ...
- 612
30votes
6answers
2kviews
Does the advent of the SSD have any implication for database optimization?
Today I was browsing through a book on SQL Server optimization and it seemed that a certain amount of the ideas were based on a linear model of storage. As SSDs have a completely different storage ...
user23157
23votes
8answers
26kviews
How would you design a user database with custom fields
This question is around how should I design a database, it can be relational / nosql databases, depending on what will be the better solution Given a requirement where you'll need to create a system ...
- 331
23votes
5answers
11kviews
Reason to prefer RIGHT JOIN over LEFT JOIN
If I understand correctly, every RIGHT JOIN: SELECT Persons.*, Orders.* FROM Orders RIGHT JOIN Persons ON Orders.PersonID = Persons.ID can be expressed as a LEFT JOIN: SELECT Persons.*, Orders.* ...
- 693
21votes
2answers
30kviews
Why should I use foreign keys in database? [closed]
In my 10+ years of experience in the IT field, I have never used foreign keys in any of my projects and I never felt the need. I did work with professional databases that had foreign keys constraints. ...
- 1,045
18votes
3answers
9kviews
Are surrogate keys a known anti-pattern?
My workplace's database has a pattern that I've not seen before. Every column that is intended to be a key, whether primary or foreign, ends in _SK. This is shorthand for "surrogate key". It ...
- 1,007
15votes
2answers
12kviews
Why NoSQL over SQL? [duplicate]
Possible Duplicate: When would someone use MongoDB (or similar) over traditional RDMS? How well the SQL and NoSQL go head-to-head. I read somewhere that SQL databases are not well for data that is ...
- 1,526
13votes
10answers
9kviews
Is there any benefit to a separate table that is one-to-one with the primary data table?
I've inherited a system with an Oracle relational database with a couple of tables modeled like I've sketched below, where there's an entire child table that only stores a single status code in a one-...
- 386
12votes
4answers
5kviews
Storing n-gram data
I was hoping to brainstorm a little bit on the subject of storing n-gram data. In my project, I am trying to solve linguistic problems where I know all (n-1) data items and want to statistically guess ...
- 221
11votes
2answers
10kviews
Is indexing foreign keys a good practice?
Looking at DB tables created by a different developer I have noticed that whenever a table had a forein_key_id field/column, it was always an INDEX/KEY. I am not sure if it was manually created, or ...
- 8,257
