With good naming and datatyping conventions, an automated script can help you with the process of creating foreign key constraints across your database, or actually, suggest table relations where you’ve forgotten to implement them.
Tag: foreign key
Efficient data, part 1: Normalization
We’ve talked a lot about optimizing queries and query performance, but we haven’t really touched that much on the storage and data modelling aspects. In this series of post, I’ll run through some basic tips on how you can more efficiently model and store your data, which may come in particularly handy when you’re working with large databases and large transaction volumes, but a lot of it also makes good design sense in smaller databases.
In this first article, we’ll cover the normalized data model.
Working with dependencies
Working with dependencies, particularly recursive dependencies, may not always be entirely intuitive, but it could be critical knowledge in your database development work. This article focuses primarily on different ways of visualizing dependencies and how to loop through them using recursive common table expressions.
The assert operator and different types of updates
When you update a column that is tied to a foreign key constraint, SQL Server needs to validate (called “assert“) the new value, in order to make sure that you haven’t added a value with no matching primary key. But in some situations, it’ll assert more than just the column(s) you updated.
Cool MERGE features you may not know about
The MERGE statement is a really powerful way to create what’s called “upserts”. In this article, I’ll take a more detailed look at how you can make the best use of MERGE and I’ll also show you some cool tricks I picked up along the way.