24 of 25 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Excellent introduction to data modeling, January 23, 2006
This review is from: Database Modeling and Design: Logical Design, 4th Edition (The Morgan Kaufmann Series in Data Management Systems) (Paperback)
I also am a reviewer of the book and an interested colleague. I've used this book since its first edition as my main reference on basic data modeling, and I have been happy to comment on its newer editions. This 4th edition improves on earlier ones by including the Unified Modeling Language (UML), my own first choice for a design language for data modeling. The chapter on the UML includes everything you need, but it keeps it as simple and straightforward as possible, making the material very accessible. The real contribution of the book is in the normalization chapter and in the excellent description and examples of n-ary relationships and the consequences of their multiplicities, a very-hard-to-understand corner of the data modeling world. The inclusion in this edition of material on OLAP and data warehousing is also welcome, though very limited in scope. Finally, moving the physical design material into a separate book makes this book much more cohesive and useful as a reference for data modeling.
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13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
4th edition of a classic book, January 21, 2006
This review is from: Database Modeling and Design: Logical Design, 4th Edition (The Morgan Kaufmann Series in Data Management Systems) (Paperback)
I am one of the reviewers for this book, but have no connection to the authors, other than being an impressed colleague.
This is a well-written, solid book by knowledgeable authors. Based on my consulting experience, many applications fall flat because of missing or inferior database conceptualization and design -- the subject of this book. The authors clearly explain how to build a database in terms of Entity-Relationship modeling. So if you think you could benefit from some advice, I recommend that you consider Teorey et al's new book.
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8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
A nice to read book, but not your unique one, June 13, 2009
This review is from: Database Modeling and Design: Logical Design, 4th Edition (The Morgan Kaufmann Series in Data Management Systems) (Paperback)
This book can be considered as having been structured in four distinct parts.
First part, the introductory one, is made of three chapters starting with the description of the Database Lifecycle, from Requirements Analysis to Physical Design. Then, follow the Entity-Relationship Modeling and the UML chapters in which the reader is presented ER constructs and basic UML notation used in the following chapters.
Second part is about the core of the book: Data Modeling. Requirements Analysis and Conceptual Modeling are addressed in chapter 4.
Next chapter is about transforming the Conceptual Data Model to SQL and contains a very useful set of figures that summarize how different relationship types, i.e. one-to-one, one-to-many, many-to-many, are translated into sets of SQL table creation constructs, including primary and foreign key attributes. This chapter alone may be worth the price of this book.
Chapter 6 addresses Normalization. Expectedly, First, Second, Third and Boyce-Codd Normal Forms are explained here, without resorting to too much theory. Things are different, however, for the Fourth and Fifth Normal Forms, as a good understanding of MVD - Multivalued Dependency - and of related rules and axioms are needed to grasp what 4NF and 5NF really mean. These are the most theoretical 10 pages or so of this book.
In the last chapter of this part, there is "An example of Logical Database Design"; an insignificant chapter of a few pages long, based on a very simplistic implementation of the all-too-common "Retail Store" problem that barely translates into 8 SQL table creation construct sets.
Third part, chapter 8, is about Business Intelligence. It covers Data Warehousing, OLAP and Data Mining. It is unclear to me why the authors chose to spend - should I say waste - 40 pages on a 200 plus page book addressing OLAP-specific data modeling, that is in many aspects in opposition with OLTP-specific data modeling principles - denormalized vs. normalized tables, star schema vs. ER diagrams - that the authors addressed, developed and promoted in the first 145 pages of the book.
Fourth and last part addresses CASE Tools for Logical Database Design. Although useful and interesting, we have here 25 pages prone to quick obsolescence because somewhat product-specific.
This book does not address the handling of business rules and of time-dependent data, although common in real-life databases.
Overall, this is a nice to read introductory book, but certainly not your unique book if you expect to be able to perform serious database modeling. The statement on back cover "... get plenty to help you grow from a new database designer to an experienced designer developing industrial-sized systems" seems a bit presumptuous.
My suggestion to the authors: Drop chapter 8 and write another book on OLAP-specific data modeling; rewrite chapter 7 by referring to a more realistic and consistent case example; address handling of business rules and time-dependent data.
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