Beginning Database Design: From Novice to Professional

Product Description

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.

Product Details

* Amazon Sales Rank: #35572 in Books
* Published on: 2007-01-15
* Original language: English
* Number of items: 1
* Binding: Paperback
* 300 pages

Editorial Reviews

About the Author
Clare Churcher holds a Ph.D. in physics and has designed several databases for a variety of large and small projects. She is currently the head of the applied computing group at Lincoln University where her teaching has included analysis and design, database, and programming. She has supervised over 70 undergraduate projects designing databases for small projects.
Customer Reviews

A Very Good Book to Start With5
This is a book that surely covers the basics everybody involved in database design needs to know.
A first chapter, named "What Can Go Wrong", somewhat short, is all about the shortcomings that will ensue from a poorly modeled database.
A summary of the development process, from problem statement to design then to implementation follows. Requirements and use cases are addressed right after.
Data Modeling is addressed in the next 6 chapters, with the support of sound and sensibly chosen practical examples. Usual database design topics such as Relationship Cardinalities, Specialization, Generalization, Normalization, Constraints, etc. are well explained in a very practical way. There is not much theory in there.
The Queries chapter is MS Access-oriented and, as such, does not give much insight on SQL constructs, although some are provided as examples. If your project requires serious SQL querying, you'll definitely need additional SQL book(s).
This book is clearly aimed at beginners and mainly intended for small and "simple" database designs, standalone MS Access applications. If you are new to database design, this is a very good book to start with, but if your database project requires more complex design, you'll definitely need to get additional reading digging deeper into Data Modeling and SQL.
The book is accessible, easily understandable and well illustrated. I've noticed no typing errors.
To get the most out of this book, I would recommend putting it into application in a small standalone MS Access database design of your own, and then only moving on to further reading.

Mixed feelings4
This is a good book, however, I have found the following to be not enough developed enough:
- Database design software. Aside from MS Access and phpMyAdmin, the author should have talked about other applications to build the database. Applications that come to mind are MySQL Workbench, Toad, DBDesigner, etc...
- OO database development. The author gives an overview of how it works, but doesn't explain precisely how to make it happen, like she did for relational database systems.
But if, like me, you are only interested in relational database development, and if you know about a good visual database-modeling application, this book is excellent.

Ehhhh...3
Not so sure if I like this book. I mean, maybe its good for some, but I dont really have much interest in Databases (I had to buy it for my class) so it wasn't really to my liking. I would prefer more pictures and stuff. But my teacher likes it so... yep.