SQL Antipatterns slides

Monday I gave a presentation at the MySQL User Conference in Santa Clara.  I uploaded my presentation materials as a PDF to my website.  It’s available under the Creative Commons 2.0 license for non-commercial, no derivative use.

Download the PDF at http://www.karwin.com/downloads/SQL_Antipatterns_MySQLUC2008.pdf

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4 responses to “SQL Antipatterns slides”

  1. Simon_Schmitt_HD Avatar

    Sometimes you’ll find something out in webspace brilliant like a diamond. These slides are really great. Thanks for this great overview!

  2. FelhőBácsi Avatar

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  3. Gergely Hodicska Avatar

    Thanks for sharing the slides, it is a really great collection of antipatterns, and I really liked the pragmatic and demanding approach how the presentation is built up.

    An another common antipattern is the following: one have more entities (users, articles etc.) and has one comment table where there is an entity_type (metadata) and an entity_id (data) field. I don’t like this one too, what is your opinion about this?

  4. Bill Karwin Avatar

    Hi Gergely, thanks for your comment. Yes, what you are describing is called “Polymorphic Associations” and it’s also an antipattern.

    Like Entity-Attribute-Value, Polymorphic Associations store metadata as data, and this antipattern fails to use the database to enforce data integrity.

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