Customer Reviews

Beginning Database Design: From Novice to Professional

5 star:		(15)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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!

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.

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.

I have been looking for a practical yet easy to read book on relational database design and I wish I had this book when I started to read up on the subject. This book is a pleasure to read, and the author is definately an expert in the domain. This book will act as a guide during your design decisions and will give you pointers on how to get the design right the first time, helping you avoid painful reworks and mistakes.

If you are new to the subject, and would like to learn more, or even if you are experienced, this book gets down to the basics of what it is you are trying to model, and teaches the steps you can take on how to do it.

The book is short, sweet, to the point, and will get you modeling databases right in no time.

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.

The more I get into database design, the more I keep coming back to this book, as well as Database Design Demysified. The two books are oriented toward small to medium databases, and that's the best way to learn the fundamentals. In my work for the government, I've only seen one or two decently designed databases. The true examples in the book of databases gone wrong are amazing and oh so common. Some much needed humor enlivens a dry subject in both books, and neither throws a lot of jargon at you. Database Modeling and Design (T Teorey) could never teach me how to design a good database! It just never gets down to the nitty gritty details of what works and what doesn't, and why. The two good books are complementary- I reccommend you get them both. Good Luck!

I needed to learn about databases. So what do I do? I have Access on my computer and I want to learn how to use it. Sound reasonable, doesn't it? So I go out and buy a couple of books I figure would help me understand Access, right?

Little do I know that to use Access, I have to understand the whole concept of a relational database.

I should have started with Clare Churcher's little book. It is straighforward, to the point, easy to read, and infomative. I like to think of myself as a relatively clever person, but trying to learn how to use a widely available product like MS Access without some preliminaries is like trying to learn how to play baseball by reading the Sabermetric Baseball Encyclopedia. Ya' gotta get out there and play and have someone show you. As I read Churcher's book, I felt like she was there reading over my shoulder anticipating my questions and answering them as I went along.

I think Churcher is likely a gifted teacher. I'm glad she made the transition from physics to computer science in her career because I believe that I have benefitted from her work in this little book.

I have gone on to other topics and other books in my quest to understand and use RDBMS. For me, this book is clearly the best place to start. And it will hold a place on my bookshelve as a reference when I need a little clarification and explanation in the future.

i think this book can be shortened to at least half it's current length but it's an easy read nonetheless. i feel like the topic could have been taught much better and faster, but i also couldn't find any other book that is a better introduction to databases for beginners. some of the examples were also a little dry for me (maintaining a database about plant species, genus name, plant usage is one of the more persistent examples used in the book - while a technically relevant example, i found it hard to relate/stay awake). it's a good book, but i'll give it 4 stars in the hope that someone writes a better one because i know it's possible. think of this book as being taught by a very competent professor with a not very interesting delivery style.

I wanted to learn the fundamentals of modeling data and designing appropriate SQL tables for a moderately complicated online database, and I had been very frustrated with another book on data modeling that I had started off reading. Fortunately, I decided to try this Churcher book instead. It is clearly the work of a very intelligent lady, and I really don't see anything that she could have improved. She writes clearly, gives a range of interesting concrete examples, and then draws out the lessons that these examples suggest in a very illuminating and clever way. I highly recommend this book.

This book is excellent for someone who is trying to get into learning databases. I like using a different form of ERD than mentioned in this book, but I couldn't find any errors with this book. I found this comforting since many database books use the author's interpretations of database design, rather than generally accepted practices. Awesome educational book!