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 ...

perspectives The relational database so dominates the thinking of information technology and business professionals that its presumed suitability for essentially all data management tasks is rarely ...

The real nugget in the post is “the whole point of seeking alternatives is that you need to solve a problem that relational databases are a bad fit for.” Adam Keys in his The Real Adam blog post ...

Often one reads a book or hears a presenter making a pun about relational theory being called “relational” because of entities being “related.” Such references are nothing but misplaced puns.

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 ...

Even with all the hype around NoSQL, traditional relational databases still make sense for enterprise applications. Here are four reasons why. Dave Rosenberg Co-founder, MuleSource Dave Rosenberg has ...

Key-value, document-oriented, column family, graph, relational… Today we seem to have as many kinds of databases as there are kinds of data. While this may make choosing a database harder, it makes ...

Every decade seems to have its database. During the 1990s, the relational database became the principal data environment, its ease of use and tabular arrangement making it a natural for the growing ...

A database that maintains a set of separate, related files (tables), but combines data elements from the files for queries and reports when required. The concept was developed in 1970 by Edgar Codd, ...