SQLBits 2018
Tame Your Unruly Data...With Constraints!
Is your data badly behaved and embarrassing you? Are you tired of cleaning up its messes? Constraints can help you straighten out your wayward data and put it on the right path before it gets into too much trouble.
Never given time or care, never forming good relationships, becoming bloated, corrupt and rife with indistinguishable copies, and all so horrifyingly pervasive in society. But enough about the Kardashians, what about YOUR DATA? If you want to straighten it out and prevent it from going too far in the first place, this session is for you. We will cover constraint basics (not null, check, primary key/unique, foreign keys), provide standard use cases, and address misconceptions about constraint use and performance. We will also look at triggers and application logic and why these are NOT substitutes for (but can effectively complement) good constraint usage. Attendees will enjoy learning how to keep THEIR data off the tabloid page!
Speakers
Rob Volk's other proposed sessions for 2026
DeepSQL: How To Discover SQL Server Internals - 2026
Log Shipping for SQL Server - 2026
Revenge: The AI: Lightning Talk - 2026
Rob Volk's previous sessions
Thats So Metadata: Discover Your Database From the Inside
Learn about the metadata features in SQL Server that describe your database and how they can make documentation, tuning, and maintenance much easier.
Tame Your Unruly Data...With Constraints!
Is your data badly behaved and embarrassing you? Are you tired of cleaning up its messes? Constraints can help you straighten out your wayward data and put it on the right path before it gets into too much trouble.
Revenge: The SQL!
Are you a frustrated DBA? Ready to snap? Before you do, come see Revenge: The SQL! and learn a kinder, gentler form of vengeance.
Lego Sets: Relational Building Blocks
Introductory Relational Theory Using Lego Bricks to Model Data and Set Operations