Site: James Rhoat — Giving back to the community
Source: https://james.rhoat.com/p/db-design-part-1/
Title: Database Design Part 1
Description: An introduction to SQL Server database design covering data type selection, table structure, and why thoughtful design matters for long-term performance.
Date: 2021-01-03
Categories: sql-server, SQL Server database design fundamentals, choosing the right data types, relational database best practices, database schema planning, SQL Server performance by design
Word count: 249
Reading time: 2 min

Contents:
- [Introduction](#introduction)

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# Database Design Part 1


## Introduction

When first starting in the software world many companies do not hire database administrators or data analysts. This often leads to poorly designed databases and inefficient databases. In this series, I will touch on Datatype choice, table structures, and how this affects your database performance.

The main reason, I wanted to start this post is for a friend who is struggling in his college database class, who has a final project for designing a database. However, the concepts are scalable and do apply to anyone who is building a database. I would also like to shout out to Kimberly Tripp at [SQLSkills.com](https://www.sqlskills.com/), her enthusiasm during her courses on pluralsight and blog have definitely helped me stay interested in SQL.

To start off, I would like to throw out one of Kimberly's favorite quotes regarding database design. "Disk space is cheap, who cares about 4 bytes versus 16 bytes?". While disk space has become cheaper, it doesn't mean that we should always use a bigint when a tinyint will do the job. As the series continues, we will go through some of the reasons why this is generally a bad practice.

Additionally, as a final note in the introduction, I would like to mention again that this blog is for Microsoft SQL server and most of the information that is given will refer to microsoft specifically, and while the theories will transfer in practice it may not be the best solution for the other RDBMS (Relational DataBase Management Systems).


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