This next two weeks are going to be awesome. May 11, I get to see the Who for probably the last time ever. Saturday I am speaking on Database Design at SQL Saturday in Atlanta, then heading to Disney World. It rarely gets even close to this good for a two week span, and SQL Saturday is a big part of that. I love going to SQL Saturdays, seeing all of the people who I usually only see as a handle in a twitter feed or blog post.
As I considered this week, I couldn’t help but try to find a somewhat interesting way to blog about it. The presentation I am doing is my oldest, and truly most favorite presentation. I have done it many times over, and it only changes a little bit here and there every time I give it.
Baba O’Reilly, Carousel of Progress, and Database Design?
The Who is celebrating 50 years, and a few songs they sing will be close to that age…and they are still relevant today and connect with the audience young and old. A (begrudgingly) favorite attraction of mine at Disney World is the Carousel of Progress, largely because it is charmingly old but the message still relevant (if dated,) particularly to a computer scientist who wants to affect technology for the future. Relational database design is a fundamental tool for producing software, even in the 30+ years since it was started. Much like you won’t appreciate music and theme parks without knowing the classics, understanding relational database concepts will help you design any solution using a database.
As a speaker and writer, you want to produce new and interesting stuff, but it may be the oldies that people want to hear. I love to do this presentation largely because the topic, and there are plenty of people who still need to learn the fundamentals of database design. Of course, I won’t entertain you like The Who, and the classroom will almost certainly not rotate after each section of the presentation, but if you are hearing about design for the first or fiftieth time, I feel certain you will get something from it.
If Database Design interests you, I hope to see you in my session this Saturday! If you are still on the fence, here is the abstract:
Data should be easy to work with in SQL Server if the database has been organized as close as possible to the standards of normalization that have been proven for many years, but are often thought of as old-fashioned. Many common T-SQL programming “difficulties” are the result of struggling against these standards and can be avoided by understanding the requirements, applying normalization, as well as a healthy dose of simple common sense. In this session I will give an overview of how to design a relational database, allowing you to work with the data structures instead of against them. This will let you use SQL naturally, enabling the query engine internals to optimize your output needs without you needing to spend a lot of time thinking about it. This will mean less time trying to figure out why SUBSTRING(column,3,1) = ‘A’ is killing your performance, and more time for solving the next customer problem.
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