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 ...

Databases are used in many different settings, for different purposes. For example, libraries use databases to keep track of which books are available and which are out on loan. Schools may use ...

Every decade seems to have its database. During the 1990s, the relational database became the principal data environment, its ease of use and tabular arrangement making it a natural for the growing ...

Even with all the hype around NoSQL, traditional relational databases still make sense for enterprise applications. Here are four reasons why. Dave Rosenberg Co-founder, MuleSource Dave Rosenberg has ...

Most database startups avoid building relational databases, since that market is dominated by a few goliaths. Oracle, MySQL and Microsoft SQL Server have embedded themselves into the technical fabric ...