Got data? Despite relational databases being the default choice for decades, many developers are in the dark about how they actually work. Perhaps they're happy to treat them as a magic box to put data in. Perhaps they looked into it all once, and it looked scary, so they didn't look again. It's a specialist area, right? Ask that other guy.
In this session we'll discuss what a relational database is and fundamentally how they work. We'll write our own rudimentary relational database in C#, and examine different approaches for combining data from multiple files. In the process we'll rediscover the three fundamental strategies that relational databases use to combine data, strategies that - as a developer - you will already know and recognize. And we'll see where the 'magic box' mindset breaks down in real life use.
If you don't know your MERGE JOIN from your NESTED LOOPS, this is the session for you. You won't leave a database tuning expert, but if you can think about the basics early enough, maybe you won't have to be.
(PS: If you went to my YOW! talk - this is not the same talk, it's a complimentary one)