The concept of database sharding has gained popularity over the past several years due to the enormous growth in transaction volume and size of business-application databases. This is particularly ...

To help differentiate themselves in today's highly competitive marketplace, service carriers are adding multiple levels of service. To better support this expansion, more systems are implementing ...

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 ...