Most any application needs some form of persistence—a way to store the data outside of the application for safekeeping. The most basic way is to write data to the file system, but that can quickly ...

This post is one of a series that introduces the fundamentals of NOSQL databases, and their role in Big Data Analytics. What are key value databases? A key value database is a collection of paired ...

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 ...

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 ...

Surrogate means a stand-in, a substitute. Surrogate keys take the place of a natural key as the primary key within a database table. Ideally, surrogate keys stand in the shadows and are used in ...