Why are there INFOMATION_SCHEMA and catalog views in SQL Server that do very similar things? For example, to retrieve a list of tables in a database, I can do it via sys.tables or ...

I've got this view defined on two tables, one of which has an identity field that auto increments. There seems to be no way to insert into this view. If I leave the auto-increment field blank it barks ...

Unlike standard views they can provide significant performance gains. Oracle has a similar feature called Materialized Views. Indexed Views were introduced in SQL Server 2000 as an Enterprise Edition ...

A typical screen in your user interface probably combines data from several different tables. To handle that, I typically have my back-end processes generate Data Transfer Objects (DTOs) which combine ...