When you create a Microsoft Access table, Access will automatically create a primary key to your database table. Still, you can also specify the field you want as the primary key for your database ...

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 ...

The column (field) in a relational database that uniquely identifies the row in the table. For example, account number is often a primary key. A "composite primary key" or "super key" is made up of ...

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.

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 ...

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 ...

Most applications need some form of persistence—a way to store the data outside the application for safekeeping. The most basic way is to write data to the file system, but that can quickly become a ...

This post is one of a series that introduces the fundamentals of NOSQL databases, and their role in Big Data Analytics. What are key value databases? A key value database is a collection of paired ...