Regular Sized Data

For roughly the first two years of my database career, I used SQL Server almost exclusively. When I began to use Oracle, I generally noticed the weird stuff first. Why do you have to select from dual? Why can’t you just select from nothing? Why did it take Oracle until 2013 to have identity columns? [Read More]

About half a year ago, I created a database of the OES California salary data and analyzed a bit of it (see this post, this post, this post, and this post). I just saw that they’ve released 2017 data. That means it’s time to update the dataset, and we’ll take a look and see if there is anything interesting. Here’s a link to the Github repo, so you can look at the data yourself. I’ll probably do at least a couple posts on it, and I’ll start by looking at tech in general (rather than specific jobs). [Read More]

Recently, we’ve looked at how to store images and files in SQL Server - specifically how to insert them into and open them from the database. Storing files in the database is often considered a not great practice. The most canonical guidance comes from a 2006 paper by Microsoft which argues that it’s fine to put BLOBs under 256KB directly in the database but that files over 1MB should reside outside of the database. Let’s talk about how we can store these files outside of a database, when we are using a SQL Server-driven application. [Read More]

Last time we looked at the fairly straightforward process of inserting images and file into SQL Server. Now, let’s figure out how to get these things out of SQL Server and onto your filesystem. [Read More]

I’m going to write a few posts examining practices for storing files in SQL Server. This issue first appeared on my radar, when I encountered a 700GB database; 90% of that space was taken up by images and PDF’s. The size of the database made running CheckDB and backups a bit of a pain, and I wondered if there were any alternatives to storing these images and PDF’s directly in the database. [Read More]

Here’s a question I’ve been thinking about: how long should a piece of software last? Or: how long should a piece of software be useful? The question has been prompted by working with two completely diverging kinds of software. [Read More]

One mildly interesting difference between Oracle and SQL Server is how they treat 0-length strings. SQL Server treats them as a kind of thing distinct from a NULL value, whereas Oracle views 0-length strings and NULLS as identical. Consider the following queries in SQL Server: [Read More]