Tips and tricks for clean relational db schemas

Cleanly design your schemas. Learn to use your RDBMS to its full power.

It can be usual for software developers to let the ORM take care of the database schema. In many cases it's a bad idea as it makes the data stored in your database brittle and hard to use confidently. I'll show a few tricks which will help you cleanly store and query data by using your database engine to its full power. In some cases, using an ORM brings more problems than solutions. I'll explore these cases (they are more common than you think) and how to use the freedom given by having complete control over your schema and your queries:

• indexes
• semantic data types
• query composition
• window functions I'll show how to still be efficient and concise when going this path (with Jooq / Slick / Anorm)