Sessions

Building a SQL Database That Works

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Accepted Session
Cooking
Short form
osb2009-0009
Scheduled: Thursday, June 18, 2009 from 11:20am – 12:05pm in St. Johns
Session notes

Excerpt

As a developer, what you really need are some simple recipes for how to think about designing your SQL databases so that they are simple, maintainable, expandable and easy to troubleshoot.

Description

Application developers and programmers everywhere need SQL databases, but find their actual database an albatross. Data is duplicated, hard to find, or missing. Performance is terrible. And you find yourself writing too much SQL and not your chosen language. ORMs promised to take this pain away, but, well … nice try.

As a developer, what you really need are some simple recipes for how to think about designing your SQL databases so that they are simple, maintainable, expandable and easy to troubleshoot. I’ll introduce some easy basic rules hard-learned over 15 years of SQL database design and how to avoid some of the most common simple mistakes which take dozens of hours to fix in production.
Content will include:

  • Data modeling for normal humans
  • The Atomic Age
  • Where are my keys?
  • The embarrassment of premature optimization
  • Data extensibility and EAVil

Slides are available at http://www.pgexperts.com/presentations.html

Tags

SQL, database, design

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Speaker

  • Headshot

    Josh Berkus

    PostgreSQL Project

    Biography

    Josh Berkus is best known as a Core Team member of the world-spanning PostgreSQL project. He is CEO of PostgreSQL Experts, Inc. and in his 12 years as a database consultant he has worked with MySQL, Oracle, and MSSQL Server as well as Postgres, and is heavily involved in many OSS communities, including BIRT, OSCON, Open Source World, fink, Geek-PAC and more. He’s also a potter and a mean cook.

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