Consider, for a moment, the shelve and dbm packages for storing things in a “database.” Built-in. Lightweight. The database is essentially a mapping from identifiers to objects. It can be quite nice.

The shelve module directly puts Python objects in a file. It’s an ideal database structure for Python …

Fundamentally, we need to provide explicit version identification on a schema. This is technically easy, but organizationally nearly impossible.

Technically, we need to use some kind of version control software for our model and the resulting DDL. We need some meta-meta-data to track schema names and version numbers. If we …

I've been asked about the proper location of Stored Procedures more than once. I've come down very strongly in opposition to triggers and stored procedures.

First, PL/SQL is slow . Anecdotally, people claim that introducing PL/SQL made an app faster. I submit that they restructured the application significantly to …

I use the word denormalization heavily, to make a point to a certain class of developers. Other developers object to the term, since it doesn't have a precise meaning.

The point I often have to make this:

1. 3rd Normal Form is for Updates.
2. Data Warehousing is about Insert and Select …

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You need to read Rozhenstein on characteristic functions.

select
sum(case when a < .5 then 1 else 0 end) 'A'
,sum(case when a >= .5 and a < .75 then 1 else 0 end) 'B'
,sum(case when a >= .75 then …

First, let me point out that the Data Cartel ("DBA" means Don't Bother Asking) won't release all the information I requested, so some of this is a guess.

We'll look at a number of dumb-as-a-post SQL techniques. This is proof -- if any were needed -- that bad SQL is worse than …

See Michael Hugos "Think about screens and the data on them to simplify system development " for some helpful insight on what an "application" really is -- access to data. Simple transparency is lifted up as a critical value for software.

I liked the "If you don't believe it could be this …

The Cubulus project and Alexandru Toth 's page describe an "OLAP Aggregation Engine". It is very nice to see advanced work done on the dimensional model.

The cited research dates from 1999 (V. Markl, F. Ramsak, R. Bayer, "Improving OLAP Performance by Multidimensional Hierarchical Clustering", Proceedings of the Intl. Database …

After having written a number of application-specific object-relational mappers, I have been on the prowl for an elegant, enduring solution. I had started to come to grips with Django , and like much of the approach. Django has a tiny infrastructure feature (the settings.py file) which made it unpleasant to …

Actually, the code looks like a clever expansion on my example, in PyCon 2007 (Revised) .

"But wait," you say. "Creating a pivot table in Python?"

Of course. Spreadsheets can create pivot tables from dimensionally normalized data. However, getting the data in this form is often challenging and if there is …