Which makes for a better primary key: natural data points or meaningless values? Database developers have strong opinions on this facet of primary key design. This article settles the debate once and ...

10 tips for choosing between a surrogate and natural primary key Your email has been sent The superiority of surrogate versus natural keys is a hotly debated topic among database developers. Susan ...

When working on a multidimensional design, every fact table within scope should be handled with care. In an ideal world, each low-level fact table represents the metrics related to a business event.

One of the principles within relational theory is that each entity’s row or tuple be uniquely identifiable. This means the defined structure includes some combination of attributes whose populated ...

All documents in a MongoDB collection have a primary key dubbed _id. This field is automatically assigned to a document upon insert, so there’s rarely a need to provide it. What’s interesting about ...

Building a distributed database is complicated and needs to consider many factors. Previously, I discussed two important techniques, sharding and partitioning, for gaining greater throughput and ...

Thousands of organizations using the Cosmos DB service on Microsoft Azure need to regenerate their primary read-write keys after researchers found a vulnerability that would have given external ...