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I was talking to Vaughan from PolygonSoup a couple of nights ago and we've both spent at least part of the last week consulting with database gurus about the design of systems that we're working on at our respective places of employment. We have simultaneously come to the conclusion that we, and others that we have worked with, tend to underestimate the value of having a guru-level database guy around. Especially when dealing with enterprise level databases (Oracle and SQL Server in this case) and high traffic applications. Don’t get me wrong, we both consider ourselves very competent database programmers as far as authoring schemas, building queries, and writing stored procedures goes. But when it comes to multi-million row tables and set operations and views on remote databases having someone hardcore on the team can pay big dividends. We’ve had big performance boosts by rewriting some incremental inserts/updates as stored procedures and by fine tuning some of our indexes (and getting rid of those massive SQL Server globally unique ID’s).

So in honour of that topic, here are a couple of my favourite database articles of recent times:

Of Internet Servers and SQL Databases

Relational Database Guidelines For MMOGs

Both happen to be about writing backends for online game development but are generally relevant.