Database Modeling and Design

This book gives you guidelines on how to design a database. These guidelines do not assume that you know anything about databases, but do assume that you have lived through at least one major development project before. This is not a quick-start "how to" book, nor will it explain how to use relational database software; the guidelines are more along the lines of "Classify multivalued attributes as entities," and "Attach attributes to the entities they most directly describe." The exercises were useful and informative, and the author presents the material in a concise and clear way, free of typographical silliness or excessive personal familiarity, neither of which would contribute in any way to the material. The style is, roughly, 10% textbook, 90% cookbook.

I have no formal schooling in programming, but find myself having developed one major database application and about to embark on another larger project. I bought the book because I wasn't sure if my intuitions about database design were the right intuitions.Given what I was looking for, the book was excellent. It described (perhaps in dry language) the theoretical underpinnings of a well designed (or normalized) database.Also, the book gave me the proper smybolic and linguistic tools to tackle the task of DB design in a more organized and effecient process.In short, it turns out there are very strict rules about what makes a database a well designed database. Given that previously I was designing on intuition alone, I found this book an excellent developmental tool. There were a few things I was doing wrong that I won't do again!By the way, there are 2 chapters in the book that most people won't use. Or rather, if you need these chapters you probably don't need the other chapters. These are the chapters on geographically distributed database applications and the chapter on how the physical implementation of the database in memory can relate to query optimization.

Ok, yes the book is rather dry. No cute anecdotes here. But, if you bring yourself to really focus on it you'll find DM & D to be a well written book. At a little over 300 pages it did a great job of conveying the major DM concepts concisely yet with enough examples so that the reader can achieve a good level understanding. Also, not having to wade through another 1500 page goliath yet getting the same return, in terms of knowledge acquired, saves me time, my most valuable resource right now. Undisciplined novices may not find it a good 'motivator' book because it does serve up a great deal of information per page mixing both basic information and advanced concepts, this generally leads to rereading a page several times to let a theory and it's implications sink in. All in all I really thought it was a very worthwhile read. It filled a good number of 'holes' in my knowledge of data modeling. I've been doing Oracle database administration for 5 years and hardcore modeling in the last 2. I was pretty good at my job, now I'm even better! Hope this helps!

This is a great book on building databases the correct way. I highly recommend this book and if you cannot understand it you shouldn't be building a database anyway. It covers everything you need to know from normalization to ERD's (Entity Relationship Diagrams). I use it all the time to brush up on techniques that become rusty after not using them for a while!

This is one of the best books I have found for the intermediate-advanced DB designers out there. Most of the other books dwell too much on theory - one of my main gauges for checking out DB Modeling books has been a scan for descriptions on what First and more advanced Normal Forms mean and this book does a great job. It goes step-by-step with plenty of worthwhile examples on why you should attempt to normalize to higher degrees and even on why, as a final step, you may actually want to denormalize (yes, undo some of the work that you've done). This is not a beginner's book - go get SQL for Dummies or the like if you're just getting started. If, on the other hand, you've been creating tables, databases, and indexes for a while and can't quite figure out how to get around a pesky design problem, then this is the perfect book for you.