Customer Reviews

Data Modeling for Information Professionals with CDROM

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

When I was faced with creating a data model for an entire system for the first time, I instructed myself from this book for the theory, and from "The Data Modeling Handbook" by Reingruber and Gregory for the implementation details. There are many books on databases, some of them huge, which cover the same old rules about the five normal forms, etc. What absorbed my interest in this book is that it described how to model a relational database using concepts which, to me, seemed somewhat object-oriented. This reasonably-sized book was a very readable, informative exposition of the practical theory to have in mind when conceptualizing a database. The database built with the advice from this book is still going strong today...it's robust, flexible and expandable. Some credit for that goes to the lessons learned from this book.

I found this book to be a refreshing approach to teaching data modeling. With the current confusion between "object models" and "data models", Bob does a good jobe of presenting the concepts fundamental to both. His sequence is unusual (discussing occurrences before classes), but I think this is useful. I definitely recommend it to anyone trying to learn the field.

I am a professor here at Utah State University and I have been teaching the undergraduate database course at various places for +9 years as well as researching accounting and databases for 7 years. I quickly grew tired of standard database textbooks as they are either simply a glossary of terms or a series of mathematical proofs with little real-world value. Almost all college textbooks teach modeling elements but do not teach real world issues related to data modeling. This book really hits the critical data modeling issues. This book combined with a good SQL book is a much better choice for students that desire to become database professionals. A more advanced data modeling book would be the David Hay book. These are THE two best books on data modeling bar none!!!

Since there are not many books written on the subject of logical data modeling despite the glaring need for instructional and reference material for this data management technique, I was very interested to learn of a new volume, "Data Modeling for Information Professionals". I eagerly purchased a copy and started to read it, expecting to find familiar concepts and some new insights. However, this book did not meet my expectations. It is too wordy, unnecessarily, with too many "cute" digressions. Even many of the "entertaining" passages are artificial and leave the reader with a sense of "huh?". These deficiencies could be overlooked if the book taught the basics of logical data modeling straightforwardly, which it does not. The author confuses the novice modeler or the manager of data modelers (or worse, a user thrust into a data modeling exercise) with multiple discussions of predicates, classes, states - and takes almost 50 pages before introducing the concept of entities, and allows another 100 pages to pass before attributes are mentioned. For someone looking for a simple explanation logical data modeling, this is far too late.

The discipline of logical data modeling has been castigated by many established ("old-fashioned") data processing professionals for its esoteric nature and lack of practical relevance to application development. A book written by a team that developed a fine computer-based training program for data modeling ("Infostructure Pro") could have dispelled this myth by providing forthright explanations of the concepts and practical, easy to understand examples of each technique used in probable modeling situations. Unfortunately, this book does not achieved the goal of advancing the understanding and acceptance of data modeling in the general IT community.

Last year I saw several presentations of Bob in Dresden. Even though the majority of the audience were data modeling professionals Bob captured the audience up to the last minute. Attendees still talk about this event today because it has been so different from other theoretical and dry presentations. And this is true for his book too. Bobs style to present data modeling is easy to understand, good for many smiles in between, entertaining but still precise. Predicates is his favorite item and finding them is the most important and difficult part in data modeling. He uses lots and lots of simple examples taken from real life to identify items being predicates and those not being predicates. Just the discusson on predicates is worth reading the book but there is much more... Anybody, technical or non technical, being involved in a database project saves a lot of time and money by reading this book and gets a good understanding of what data modeling is about.

This is by far the best book on data modeling on the market today. I explains the usually incomprehesible and dry entity - relationship subject in a way that is understandable for managers, programmers, and database modelers.

I make all my employees that have to use any kind of database read this book.

This is a must have for anyone in Information Business.

Bob does a wonderful job of laying out the rules and really drives home the need to follow them precisly. This book is our bible for database design, if a question or argument arises as to where in the ERD something fits, we just go to the book and let Bob decide.

This book is required reading for any database person on my team.

This book is probably one the best books on data modelling I've had the privilege of reading. It very clearly lays out concepts that I personally have found difficult to understand from other texts. The manner is very down-to-earth and doesn't resort to academic-speak as many of these sort of texts have a tendancy of doing. His humour is well-placed, (not to mention nice to see! The author clearly doesn't take himself too seriously, and this helps his explanations tremendously!) I liked this book, and think you will too if you want something that will give you the basic tools to create a solid, dependable data store that will live into the future.

Consice discussion of data normalization, easy to follow. Overall very good, but some of the examples are a little dated, and the CD won't run on my Mac.

I read the previous reviews for this book and thought I was finally getting myself a well written book on this complex topic but alas, the book only caused much frustration.

The writing style of the author is very annoying to say the least. The author assumes the reader is a "dummy" and tries hard to be funny. He fails miserably at it! After spending three weeks trying to read the book, I walked away being more confused about the concepts I already knew. This book is not worth it if you ask me.