In Oracle you can implement constraints against materialized views. Haven't tried this out myself but according to the following article it is possible to implement a constraint like the one...

On the specific question of audit tables. If your requirement is to capture actual data then you should create audit table columns that match the types of the data being...

There is seldom one "correct way" to do things but the potential advantage of this design is that you can easily enforce the rule that each item only has one...

The sp_dropserver / sp_addserver method works only for the DEFAULT instance though. On the default instance only, by using sp_dropserver / sp_addserver you can change the server name reported by...

It's not difficut to prove for yourself that a clustered index doesn't guarantee order. Example:

CREATE TABLE tbl (x INT NOT NULL PRIMARY KEY CLUSTERED, z INT NOT NULL UNIQUE);

INSERT INTO...

Ask yourself what are the determinants of publisher_city? If they are not super keys of this table then it is not in BCNF (probably not 3NF either but BCNF is...

I expect you are referring to Kimball's "Dimensional Modeling" patterns. The concepts described by Kimball are fairly unsophisticated and limited in their application. There are much better sources on temporal...

The application just sees the FILESTREAM value as a regular Windows file handle. The handle is created using the Filestream API and a virtual file path. The app never sees...

You might be interested in the new Filestream feature of SQL Server 2008.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb933993(SQL.100).aspx

That's what the view / query designer in Enterprise Manager and Management Studio does. If it bothers you then don't use the designer. The designer has more than a few...

If you create stored procs that must be called for each row then by defintion you'll have to call those procs a row at a time. Any such solution is...

Since a table doesn't preserve the "insertion order" there is no reason to control the order in which rows are inserted. Better to let the optimizer do the best job...

You haven't told us what you are trying to do so it's impossible to give a specific answer. "Use it in some statements" doesn't tell us much. If those statements...

Column storage has nothing to do with "displacing" the relational model. Column store is a model for *storage* within the DBMS. The tabular view of data is still what end...

Interesting. MERGE is standard SQL whereas REPLACE INTO is product-specific (MySQL. Any others?).

As far as I understand it, the most important difference is that REPLACE INTO automatically matches on the...