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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...