Happy New Year everyone! Hope the holiday season’s passing finds you well rested, well fed, and ready to hit the ground running. As year’s go, it was a relatively great year last year… as far as the SQL community goes in any case. But now that 2019 has started, it is time to get back down to business…

The first bit of business for me is to dust off, update, and get ready to give a presentation for SQL Saturday Nashville in just 10 days! It is always a delight to head back to the city where I lived the longest part of my life. The food, the entertainment, the sights, and more importantly, since these SQL Saturday trips are pretty much whirlwind affairs where I never get to do much of those things… hang out with a a great group of folks at the center of the local SQL community for a day.

This year, I will be presenting a session that I haven’t done for quite a while, but I submitted it again because last year when I was doing my full day database design session, I realized how much fun it was to simply discuss the things that make a database great, because it often gets lost in the process because users don’t so much see the database as they do feel it. The goal naturally is for this to be a pleasant experience all around, so it is important to think about all different characteristics necessary for a great database.

Characteristics of a Great Relational Database

When queried, most database professionals would mention normalized as one of the most important characteristics that tell the difference between a good and bad relational database design (whether they know what the term “normalized” means or not.) Normalization is a key to great relational designs, but there is so much more to be considered. A normalized database that suffers from poor naming, too many or too few indexes, terrible interfaces, and so on can derail your design’s value to the user. In this session I will present primary characteristics of a design that differentiates between an ugly design that will have your colleagues nitpicking you to death and one that will have them singing your praises. Characteristics such as comprehendible, documented, secure, well performing, and more (including normalized, naturally) will be discussed.

If you aren’t into database design (which would be a lot of people who design databases, sadly :)), there are a lot of other great sessions by many people I call friend. I won’t even try to name them, for fear of boring you and/or leaving out someone. You can check out the slate of speakers here on the schedule: https://www.sqlsaturday.com/815/Sessions/Schedule.aspx. Suffice it to say that there are more than enough great names and sessions on the schedule that I would have driven up on a Saturday to see regardless of whether I was speaking or not (and on a day of the NFL football playoff season… this is quite an endorsement coming from me.)

Hope to see you there! Register here: https://www.sqlsaturday.com/815/EventHome.aspx, and if you can, support the event even more by registering for one of their pre-cons!