Let’s be honest: we all love to play games, especially on our computers. Until the Internet became widespread, most of us played computer games by ourselves, usually against AI opponents. It was fun, but as soon as you realized how the gameplay mechanics worked, the game lost most of its magic. The development of the Internet moved games online. Now, we can play against human opponents and test our skills against theirs.

A lot has changed over the last 30 years, especially in IT-related domains, but few things have changed as much as how we shop. We still mostly buy milk and groceries at physical stores, but widespread online stores have led most of us to try some form of e-shopping. E-commerce stores have popularized many existing products and services, and they’ve introduced many more. Buying non-physical goods like subscriptions, software, music and movies in digital format is now very common.

How to design a database flexible enough to accommodate several very different card games. Recently, we showed how a database could be used to store board game results. Board games are fun, but they’re not the only online version of classic games going. Card games are also very popular. They introduce an element of luck into gameplay, and there is much more than luck involved in a good card game!

In the previous two articles, we considered the two most common data warehouse models: the star schema and the snowflake schema. Today, we’ll examine the differences between these two schemas and we’ll explain when it’s better to use one or the other. The star schema and the snowflake schema are ways to organize data marts or entire data warehouses using relational databases. Both of them use dimension tables to describe data aggregated in a fact table.

In a previous article we discussed the star schema model. The snowflake schema is next to the star schema in terms of its importance in data warehouse modeling. It was developed out of the star schema, and it offers some advantages over its predecessor. But these advantages come at a cost. In this article, we’ll discuss when and how to use the snowflake schema. The Snowflake Schema if (typeof VertabeloEmbededObject === 'undefined') {var VertabeloEmbededObject = "

Today, reports and analytics are almost as important as core business. Reports can be built out of your live data; often this approach will do the trick for small- and medium-sized companies without lots of data. But when things get bigger – or the amount of data starts increasing dramatically – it’s time to think about separating your operational and reporting systems. Before we tackle basic data modeling, we need some background on the systems involved.

Databases are designed in different ways. Most of the time we can use “school examples”: normalize the database and everything will work just fine. But there are situations that will require another approach. We can remove references to gain more flexibility. But what if we have to improve performance when everything was done by the book? In that case, denormalization is a technique that we should consider. In this article, we’ll discuss the benefits and disadvantages of denormalization and what situations may warrant it.

People like to play. So we invented games and placed them on boards. And then computers came. Now we can play against the computer or against human opponents all over the world – or right next to us. When we play against human opponents we want to have a ranking that will show others how good we are. Maybe it will scare opponents. Or we could just rub someone’s nose in our greatness.

In Part 1 of this series, I demonstrated how to install WordPress locally and how to import a WordPress database into Vertabelo. In this article, we’ll take a closer look at the tables in the WordPress database. A Quick Look at the WordPress Database Model and the Dashboard In the previous part, I imported the WordPress database into our online database modeling tool. For the record, the structure of the database is as follows:

How often have you wondered about the structure of an existing database? It could be a 5-year-old legacy system or a brand-new open-source project. Let’s take a look at the ERD diagram of the database behind the most famous content management system: WordPress. What Is WordPress and How Does It Work? WordPress is an open-source CMS (content management system) that was initially released in 2003. It started out as a blogging platform, but it has developed so much that today it can be used for almost anything.