The original intention of surrogate keys across multidimensional database designs was to help optimize joins by keeping all keys, used for joining between facts and dimensions, both numeric and single ...

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 ...

Everyone knows what a simple database is: Telephone directories, mail-order catalogs and dictionaries are all databases of sorts. Databases can be structured or organized in several different ways: as ...

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 ...

This post is one of a series that introduces the fundamentals of NOSQL databases, and their role in Big Data Analytics. What are wide column stores? Wide column stores are database management systems ...