Subject Areas

	Data Modeling	Where I talk generally about how to build highly scalable, maintainable and performant databases
	Databases	Opinions, tips and trick specific to a specific database vendor
	Grade of the Steel	Putting databases to the test and doing extreme tuning.
	Programming	General programming tips and tricks. Typically related to high speed synchronisation techniques or algorithms.

There are some general themes that repeat themselves throughout this blog.

Big Data vs. Data Warehousing

My basic architectural argument is that you should target data warehouse products to systems that HAVE a data model and that Big Data is best used where the model is more loosely defined and near schema-less – which include many of the data structures traditionally used for auditing and history tracking.

If you think of the data flow at a very high level, from a source to the warehouse, this is my approach:

I have written quite a few blog posts that I hope you will find are coming together in a coherent theme of design guidelines. To make it easier to locate them, I have provided the index below.

Keys and how to handle them

In order to deliver clean and integrated data, the proper and high performance handlings of keys is crucial. I have blogged extensively about this here:

Warehouse Knowledge

Information about large databases and how they work.

Myth Busting

I like to put “common sense” recommendations from the database community to the test. Here are the posts I have written about this so far: