Minimal Modeling

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Many explanations of JOIN are wrong, and people get confused
Most common explanations of JOIN are incomplete and build the wrong mental model. As the result, people get confused. In this post we discuss the…
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Alexey Makhotkin
Historically, 4NF explanations are needlessly confusing
4NF presented in a straightforward way, with some investigation of history of teaching 4NF.
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Alexey Makhotkin
20
240 tables and no documentation?
A bit of advice on extracting the logical schema from database tables
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Alexey Makhotkin
2
Modeling mutual friendship
Is data duplication always bad? How to deal with the additional invariants in the relational table design?
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Alexey Makhotkin
1
Sentinel-free schemas: a thought experiment
We systematically design a database schema that does not use NULLs and sentinel values. We look at the consequences of this design decisions and provide…
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Alexey Makhotkin
How to delete a lot of data
If you need to delete millions of rows and you're not careful, you can cause a database outage. Here is what you have to think about to solve this.
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Alexey Makhotkin
9
Erasure
Before we can continue the discussion of physical representation of either/or data, we need to discuss the idea of erasure. In computer science you most…
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Alexey Makhotkin
Many faces of left join
Let's discuss the SQL LEFT JOIN operator and the idea of left join.
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Alexey Makhotkin
How to store either/or data in the database
Structural data types: Introduction to design space of physical representation.
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Alexey Makhotkin
Game theory in database design
From a certain angle database modeling looks just like the game of poker.
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Alexey Makhotkin
Left joins, pt. II
Today I’d like to talk about the spectrum between narrow and wide tables, and how both kinds of tables are connected via left join.
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Alexey Makhotkin
Concatenability principle
Today I’d like to talk about the principle of concatenability in software architecture. The general idea behind it could be easily recognized…
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Alexey Makhotkin
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