Beginning Database Design: From Novice to Professional, Second Edition

Beginning Database Design, Second Edition provides short, easy-to-read explanations of how to get database design right the first time. This book offers numerous examples to help you avoid the many pitfalls that entrap new and not-so-new database designers. Through the help of use cases and class diagrams modeled in the UML, you’ll learn to discover and represent the details and scope of any design problem you choose to attack.

Database design is not an exact science. Many are surprised to find that problems with their databases are caused by poor design rather than by difficulties in using the database management software. Beginning Database Design, Second Edition helps you ask and answer important questions about your data so you can understand the problem you are trying to solve and create a pragmatic design capturing the essentials while leaving the door open for refinements and extension at a later stage. Solid database design principles and examples help demonstrate the consequences of simplifications and pragmatic decisions. The rationale is to try to keep a design simple, but allow room for development as situations change or resources permit.

• Provides solid design principles by which to avoid pitfalls and support changing needs
• Includes numerous examples of good and bad design decisions and their consequences
• Shows a modern method for documenting design using the Unified Modeling Language

What you’ll learn

• Avoid the most common pitfalls in database design.
• Create clear use cases from project requirements.
• Design a data model to support the use cases.
• Apply generalization and specialization appropriately.
• Secure future flexibility through a normalized design.
• Ensure integrity through relationships, keys, and constraints.
• Successfully implement your data model as a relational schema

About the Author

Clare Churcher is currently a senior lecturer in the Department of Applied Computing at Lincoln University, New Zealand. She holds a degree in physics with first class honors and completed a Ph.D in physics at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand. She has done postdoctoral research in the Cavendish Laboratory at the University of Cambridge, England.

Clare’s research interests are in the management and visualization of data especially for scientific research. She has a background in database design, and has taught programming, analysis and design of information systems, and database management at undergraduate level, as well as software engineering and scientific visualization at post graduate level.