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 ...

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 ...

At its heart, data modeling is about understanding how data flows through a system. Just as a map can help us understand a city’s layout, data modeling can help us understand the complexities of a ...

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

While relational databases rely on rigid structures, document databases are much more natural to work with and can be used for a variety of use cases across industries. A document database (also known ...

Even after 50 years, Structured Query Language, or SQL, remains the native tongue for those who speak data. It’s had impressive staying power since it was first coined the Structured Query English ...