I'd rather play golf

Database design is all about creating abstract – or conceptual – models of the real world that can be manipulated to support the real, live enterprise. Most of the time we have an intuitive idea of what the business entities are that need to be represented in the model: customers could be modeled with a [...]

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Inevitably, at some point performance becomes an issue for many database applications. Performance analysis is often problematic simply because there are so many variables, which include the characteristics of the hardware, the workload, physical database design, and application design, and because these considerations have tradeoffs and side-effects – there are usually no right answers. Some [...]

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Snapshot isolation and materialized views are two important features that have been part of the SQL Anywhere server since the Version 10 release, which first shipped in September 2006. In the past, I’ve written articles that explain the tradeoffs of using snapshot isolation and presented material on the space-time tradeoffs of materialized views. In one [...]

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