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 ...

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 ...

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, ...

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.

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 ...

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 ...

Conventional wisdom states that relational databases are not scalable or robust enough to handle the huge numbers of connections, the massive throughput, and all the cool tricks required to master IoT ...

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 ...