The problem of how to design a database is commonly encountered by those not specifically trained and practiced in the art. This book, therefore, is written with the lay person in mind. In simple language, the author uses examples from her real-life experience to highlight the types of problems that can result from poor design, to motivate readers to do good design. She then goes on to provide a sound method that readers can follow in order to produce a good design. While focus is on implementing designs in relational databases, the author does not forget those readers who will choose to implement their database in a spreadsheet such as Microsoft Excel.

Autorentext
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.

Zusammenfassung

Beginning Database Design: From Novice to Professional 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, youll learn how to discover and represent the details and scope of the problem in question.

Database design is not an exact science, and solid database design principles and examples help demonstrate the consequences of simplifications and pragmatic decisions. The rationale is to try to keep it simple, but allow room for development as situations change or resources permit. The book also features an introduction for implementing the final design in a relational database.

Inhalt
What Can Go Wrong.- Guided Tour of the Development Process.- Initial Requirements and Use Cases.- Learning from the Data Model.- Developing a Data Model.- Generalization and Specialization.- From Data Model to Relational Schema.- Normalization.- More on Keys and Constraints.- Queries.- User Interface.- Other Implementations.