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 ...

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 ...

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, ...

In a world that is all about new apps and cloud computing, sometimes the important stuff doesn’t look new or cool. Sometimes key small business tools are just functional, they might have been around a ...

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 ...

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 ...