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Redgate Data Modeler
The bill of materials design pattern is deceptively simple, yet incredibly powerful. This article will introduce an example, familiar to IT professionals, that you may not have thought fits the BOM pattern. It will also introduce concepts to show you how to make your BOM structures more flexible and much easier to manage. Read more
When you were learning database concepts, data modeling looked pretty easy, didn’t it? You knew all the rules, and modeling seemed like a game: get a challenge, do your best, and eventually solve it. Job well done! Moving up to the next level – and so on. Read more
Financial institutions, especially banks, usually have really large datasets. To use that data, it must be stored in such a way that it is easily available for generating reports. The trend now is to use a data warehouse to store all your relevant data, and to use smaller data marts (subsets of the warehouse)... Read more
Let’s be honest: we all love to play games, especially on our computers. Until the Internet became widespread, most of us played computer games by ourselves, usually against AI opponents. It was fun, but as soon as you realized how the gameplay mechanics worked, the game lost most of its magic. Read more
The bill of materials (BOM) design pattern is deceptively simple, yet incredibly powerful. Historically, it’s been employed to model product structures, but the pattern can be used to do much more than simply define a hierarchy. This article will introduce three very different examples to help you to recognize the pattern in your own... Read more
A lot has changed over the last 30 years, especially in IT-related domains, but few things have changed as much as how we shop. We still mostly buy milk and groceries at physical stores, but widespread online stores have led most of us to try some form of e-shopping. Today, we’ll take a... Read more
In my last post, I wrote about ensuring that your data model properly handles global information: numbers, currencies, phone numbers, addresses, dates, and time zones, among other things. However, I’ve realized that many example data models have exactly the “self-centric” or “Amero-centric” approach that I cautioned against. Read more
Social media surrounds us, so it’s not unusual for applications to require some kind of social media integration. The most common is signing in with Facebook, Twitter, or another service. Users expect to be able to log in with different social accounts. So, applications meet these expectations by offering external login options.
Let’s... Read more
Very few database authors mention the challenges of globalization and localization in any meaningful way. There’s a similar lack of foresight from database architects. The fact is that many authors and designers are frequently very ‘self-centric’: they create (or write about) data models that only properly handle their local time zones, addresses, etc. Read more
How to design a database flexible enough to accommodate several very different card games.
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Redgate Data Modeler