Beginning Database Design: From Novice to Professional [Paperback]

Clare Churcher (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 24, 2007 | ISBN-10: 1590597699 | ISBN-13: 978-1590597699 | Edition: 1

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.

Editorial Reviews

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.

Product Details

• Paperback: 300 pages
• Publisher: Apress; 1 edition (January 24, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1590597699
• ISBN-13: 978-1590597699
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 7.5 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (27 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #42,460 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

51 of 54 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Best Introductory Database Design Book I Could Find, June 17, 2007

By 

Bjorn D. Tyreus - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Beginning Database Design: From Novice to Professional (Paperback)

While having many years of object-oriented design and programming experience, until recently I had no experience in designing or implementing relational databases. I learn by reading so I picked up several of the top-rated books on the subject. I found Clare Churcher's book to be the best by far! There are two aspects of the book I found particularly attractive. First, it is short and to the point. You can read it in a day or two and learn enough of the essentials to get started on your first database design project, I did. Second, it clearly demonstrates the relationship between object-oriented data modeling and relational database design. The latter aspect made the concepts and examples particularly easy for me to understand and I suspect it will do the same for anyone else reading this book with an object-oriented programming background. Simply a great book!

30 of 32 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent introduction to database design, November 8, 2007

By 

K. Pate "kenny_in_sjc" (San Jose, CA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Beginning Database Design: From Novice to Professional (Paperback)

This book does a great job of explaining data modeling, including how it corresponds to tables in a database. The book is well-written and very organized, and the examples do a good job of illustrating the concepts. It's also mercifully short compared to other options.

It's appropriate for database beginners, and for experiences developers who are getting into database design for the first time. There's a section on how this all relates to OOP, with no focus on a specific language.

The examples apply to any database systems that support standard SQL including Access and MySQL. Note that the book does not cover Access and MySQL directly -- you'll need different resources for that. For MySQL, the tutorials on the MySQL site itself are a surprisingly good place to start.

This book tells you how to think about your database *before* you begin to develop it, which can be critical if you're designing anything even slightly complicated.

I'm developing a Ruby on Rails web app, and this book really helped me think through some issues that I had not considered until now.

38 of 43 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Not 'From Novice to Professional' (If you know what a JOIN is read this review), February 15, 2010

By 

MedIT - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Beginning Database Design: From Novice to Professional (Paperback)

Bottom line first: This is a fine book. If you use MS Access on your desktop to maintain a SOHO database this book is for you. If you have ever used MySQL or PostgreSQL on the command line or connected to a database from application code it will be much too basic.

Three stars because this book is not what I have come to expect from the Apress 'From Novice to Professional' series:

1) The book is written in a very 'chatty' style which results in a much lower information density than other titles in this series.

2) The book stops miles short of 'Professional'. At best, I'd say it lands the reader at competent, maybe dilettante, most likely charlatan.

3) The underlying technology is treated as an unfortunate complication from which the reader is insulated rather than the subject of the book.

4) The theory is illustrated through best-case examples rather than rigorously defined with boundary cases.

I'd say this book should be subtitled "For the Unwilling Accidental DBA" or published in the "For Dummies" series. It's a fine book and with either of those title it would likely end up in the correct hands.

A couple of other notes:

- The book deals almost exclusively with relational databases. Don't expect a mention of key-value stores or NoSQL (there is a chapter on using relational databases as OO databases).

- The book is not RDBMS specific; however, the author's figures, screenshots, and implementation examples are MS Access heavy.