Most applications need some form of persistence—a way to store the data outside the application for safekeeping. The most basic way is to write data to the file system, but that can quickly become a ...

Most data analysts proclaim that intelligent keys should never be used in a database. There are good reasons for this. Unfortunately, database designers get confused when talking with users and ...

If you’ve worked with relational database systems for any length of time, you’ve probably participated in a discussion (argument?) about the topic of this month’s column, surrogate keys. A great ...