Some topics are out of scope for this forum.
1. Bugs, Product Decisions, and Feedback: The purpose of this forum is not to ask the product team why decisions were made and to ask them to make other changes. That feedback belongs in Connect. The purpose of this forum is to help you out with specific issues, if possible. Please post your feedback via Connect:
Rules of Conduct
· Relevance to Topics: We encourage you to keep your postings as close to the subject as possible.
· Respect: Please be respectful of other participants, and their contributions; avoiding insults, demeaning remarks and slurs.
· Tolerance: Please don’t assume someone’s curtness was meant to insult, slur, or demean you.
· Confidentiality: Confidential information should not be posted. This is a publicly available forum.
· Appropriate Language: Please keep the conversation on a professional level, avoiding any hint of profanity in your interactions.
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Forum Moderators may, at their discretion, edit posts for clarity, readability and inappropriate language; split post into separate threads when appropriate; and delete post that do not positively contribute to the thread. Failure to comply with these ‘Rules of Conduct’ may result in your posts being edited to remove the offending comments, censure, or expulsion from participating in the Forums. The bottom line is: this Forum should feel like a ‘safe’ place to ask hard questions that invoke passionate responses.
Marking Answers
By their very nature, many database design questions will not have a easily decernible ‘answer’. You are encouraged to give folks ‘credit’ for helping you when appropriate. If someone’s response was ‘Helpful’, use the ‘Vote as Helpful’ button. If a response answered some part of your question, or provided you one or more clues that led you to a solution, then use the ‘Mark as Answer’ option. Just as a thread may evolve into multiple questions, it may also have more than one ‘Answer’.
Welcome to the Database Design Forum
This is a Forum for questions and discussions about database designs for Microsoft technologies, including: SQL Server, Access, SQL Azure, SQL Express, SQL Compact, etc. Often Database Designs will be generic and can be ported to any vendor’s technology. Design problems that are best solved with other technologies will be welcomed and addressed to the best of our knowledge and ability.
We ask that you recognize that database design is a mixture of art and science. You may receive conflicting suggestions, for there can be multiple paths to a workable solution. You will have to use your own judgment and knowledge of your business requirements to determine the best solution for your particular problem. The ‘right’ design is compounded by many factors, including business, regulatory, hardware/software requirements, as well as staff expertise. We also encourage you to share your experiences with a particular design issue if it will serve to help others encountering similar problems.
In order to receive useful responses, please spend some time and properly present your scenario. Attempts to ‘save time and effort’ by cutting out parts of the scenario will often lead to wasted time and effort as the suggestions have to be discarded because they don’t work with other parts of the unseen puzzle.
But there are limits to what you can expect from volunteers through a disconnected medium. The questions most likely to receive a good and targeted answer, are those that present a small problem, that give a very clear description of that problem within its context, and that are placed by people with a fair understanding of the subject who need help getting over a few nasty bumps. The questions that are almost impossible to answer satisfactorily are those that present a huge problem, with no clear description, and asked by someone totally new to the subject matter.
We hope that you will understand when we say that most of us that volunteer our time on this Forum do so in order to help folks learn. We will be pleased if you find the Forum to be useful. However, it is difficult or impossible for us to engage with folks privately. We don’t have time to do both, and our commitment is help folks using the Forums.
Do not hesitate to read all of the threads, join in the discussions, offer your own experiences and information, and ask questions to increase your knowlege. Seek out blogs from those who write in a manner that you appreciate, and consider reviewing the Database Design Resources for additional guidance and help.
