Reducing the size of a reporting database starts with compression, archiving, and index review; shrinking files comes last.
What Is a Star Schema?
A star schema is one fact table surrounded by dimension tables. What facts and dimensions hold, why grain is the decision you cannot undo, why the data repeats on purpose, and a worked example in AdventureWorksDW.
Designing a Date Dimension
A date dimension makes reporting calendars explicit with fiscal periods, holidays, weekdays, and a repeatable SQL Server build script.
SQL SERVER – Step by Step Guide to Beginning Data Quality Services in SQL Server 2012 – Introduction to DQS
A step by step introduction to Data Quality Services in SQL Server 2012 for beginners: build a Knowledge Base from an Excel file and use it to spot bad data.
Columnstore Indexes for Reporting Tables
Columnstore indexes for reporting tables can cut scan work, but clustered and nonclustered designs affect loading and point lookups differently.
Why Staging Tables Earn Their Keep
Use staging tables to preserve raw input, validate changes, separate extraction from publication, and make failed loads easier to diagnose and replay.
What Is Big Data? A Simple Explanation for Database People
What Is Big Data? It is the point where data outgrows one machine, and the fix is to scale out. This post explains the failures of one server and walks through 40 TB split across 8 nodes.