Joe discusses Hierarchical, Vector and Concatenation encoding before rounding up with general guidelines for designing encoding schemes.
2019-03-26 (first published: 2011-08-31)
4,391 reads
Joe discusses how to deal with the kinds of encoding schemes, how to use them and how to design them. He discusses Enumeration, Measurement, Abbreviation and Algorithmic categories
2019-03-26 (first published: 2011-08-10)
5,951 reads
Joe Celko introduces more powerful scales such as Interval, Log interval and ratio scales; before moving on to conversions, punctuation and units. Finally he gives guidelines as to how best to use scales in a database.
2019-03-26 (first published: 2011-07-27)
4,566 reads
Joe Celko discusses Nominal, Categorical, Absolute, Ordinal and Rank scales. These are the weakest scales we can use, starting with the weakest.
2019-03-26 (first published: 2011-07-06)
6,423 reads
Joe Celko tackles the most difficult of all the types of data handled by SQL, temporal data, and explains how to avoid the commonest traps for the unwary programmer
2020-07-08 (first published: 2011-06-15)
10,982 reads
Character-handling in SQL is not particularly straightforward, and confusion about collation and character encoding is a common cause of problems with searching, joining, and sorting.
2019-03-26 (first published: 2011-06-01)
9,135 reads
A confusion about the nature of numbers can lead to a number of problems in database applications. Joe Celko gives a simple guide to the subject
2019-03-26 (first published: 2011-05-18)
11,976 reads
IT projects can hit problems that turn out to be due to an insufficient understanding of the basic data and data-types, rather than the database design. It is a sorely neglected topic that might seem to be trivial, but certainly isn't. The DBA, with a broad perspective on corporate data can do a great deal to help application developers to avoid the common mistakes that so often happen, and Joe Celko's Stairway gives the busy IT professional a crash course to understanding the nature of the data being processed.
2019-03-26 (first published: 2011-04-07)
3,000 reads
This Friday Steve Jones has a DR poll. He asks what might be more important to you in a disaster and why.
2015-07-10 (first published: 2011-01-07)
228 reads