Great blog entry about using Surrogate keys in a datawarehouse.
Why I prefer surrogate keys instead of natural keys in database design
Simply put:
I prefer using surrogate keys because natural keys are by default a subject to change which is a bad behavior for a row identifier.
But let’s dig a bit deeper into each key type to see why this is. Here’s a little table with column names that tell us what kind of a key each column is.
Surrogate keys
A surrogate key is a row identifier that has no connection to the data attributes in the row but simply makes the whole row unique. And that property is also the downside of it. Because it has no connection to the data attributes we can have two rows with the exact same data in all columns except the key column. This is usually handled at the application side and is an acceptable downside.
An example of a surrogate key is an integer identity or a GIUD unique identifier. I’ve never seen another data type being used as a surrogate key successfully. Both have their pros and cons though.
via Why I prefer surrogate keys instead of natural keys in database design.
Defragging Indexes for Beginners
Indexes over time become fragmented and as a result don’t work quite as well as they should. This short talk will show you how an index can become fragmented and will also show you the steps to fix index fragmentations.
Effective Indexes for Beginners
From SQL Server 2005 onwards, we have been able to use a DMV to identify which of our indexes are effective and which of our indexes can be disabled. This short talk will show you how and why you should be checking the effectiveness of your indexes.
Presented by Amanda Jackson
Consultant/Developer with Fronde Systems Ltd with almost 20 years experience in the IT industry. Amanda is currently focusing on SQL development and BI and is working towards Microsoft BI development and maintenance certification. In the past she has covered most roles in IT including: Developer, Network Admin, Change Control Manager, Source Control & Build Manager, QA, Games Development, Novell DBA.
Amanda is also the founder of Girl Geek Dinners in New Zealand
Register here
I have just read a very good Blog on Cloud computing by Dave Pinalkumar MVP SQL Server
I would highly recommend checking his blog out
Blog
I found this blog about using MS SQL Profile to help locate issues in large complex stored proc’s.
Well with a read and bookmark
We’ve all had them. One of those stored procedures that is huge and contains complex business logic which may or may not be executed. These procedures make it an absolute nightmare when it comes to debugging problems because they’re so complex and have so many logic offshoots that it’s very easy to get lost when you’re trying to determine the path that the procedure code took when it ran. Fortunately Profiler lets you define custom events that you can raise in your code and capture in a trace so you get a better window into the sub events occurring in your code. I found it very useful to use custom events and a database snapshot to debug some code recently and we’ll explore both in this article. I find raising these events and running Profiler to be very useful for testing my stored procedures on my own as well as when my code is going through official testing and user acceptance. It’s a simple approach and a great way to catch any performance problems or logic errors.
SQL Team Mike Femenella
Excellent article by Pinalkumar Dave detailing the 3 languages of BI
MDX – Multidimensional Expressions. This language is used for retrieving data from SSAS cubes. It looks very similar to T-SQL, but it is very different in the areas of conceptualization and implementations.
DMX – Data Mining Extensions. This is again used for SSAS but rather than cubes it is used for data mining structures. This language is more complicated than MDX. Microsoft has provided lots of wizards in its BI tools, which further reduced experts for learning this language which deals with data mining structures.
XMLA – XML for Analysis. This is mainly used for SSAS administrative tasks. It is quite commonly used in administration tasks such as backup or restore database, copy and move database or learning meta data information. Again, MS BI tools provide lots of wizards for the same.
The complete article can be found on Dave’s Blog
