Beginning Database Design (Wrox Beginning Guides) (Paperback)

~ Gavin Powell (Author)
Key Phrases: database model design, comment date number, child table record, Larry Niven, Isaac Azimov Foundation, James Blish (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description

• The perfect reference for programmers, administrators, or Web designers who are new to database development and are uncertain as to how to design and structure a database efficiently
• Shows how to design and implement robust, scalable databases on any of the major relational database management systems, including Access, SQL Server, IBM DB2, MySQL, and Oracle
• Covers all the key database design steps including modeling, normalization, SQL, denormalization, object-modeling, data warehousing, and performance
• Provides plenty of real-world examples and a complete beginning-to-end case study of creating a database that includes the analysis and planning, tables and data structures, business rules, and hardware requirements

From the Back Cover

Database design involves how to best structure the tables and queries that are used with databases in order to provide optimum performance, storage, manageability, and flexibility. With relational databases, you can use those tables to organize your data and retrieve information from your database. This book provides you with an easy-to-understand explanation of designing and building relational database models to do just that.

The numerous step-by-step examples and a helpful case study simplify a potentially complex subject and present it to you in an organized, understandable manner. You'll find out why relational database models became necessary in the first place, and how the relational database model was devised. Ultimately, you'll discover how to make much better use of your database by applying what you've learned about building the database model.

What you will learn from this book

• Basic concepts of relational database modeling
• The components of a relational database model
• Making normalization easier to use
• Advanced relational database modeling
• How to improve relational database model performance
• Describing tables during using analysis (WHAT needs to be solved)
• Refining tables and relationships using design (HOW to provide solutions)
• How to read and write data with SQL
• Create relational database models by applying business rules

Who this book is for

This book is for new database developers. No prior database or programming experience is required.

Wrox Beginning guides are crafted to make learning programming languages and technologies easier than you think, providing a structured, tutorial format that will guide you through all the techniques involved.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 504 pages
• Publisher: Wrox (December 5, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0764574906
• ISBN-13: 978-0764574900
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 7.4 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (16 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #676,060 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

17 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Lots and Lots of Fluff, Needs Editor, January 30, 2006

By	R. Sandridge - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This is possibly the worst written technical book I've ever read. I'd REALLY like my money back. Powell repeats some things over and over and over again. Sometimes, he re-phrases the same concept 3 or more times in the very same paragraph.

For example, I could not even guess how many times he explains that excessive normalization leads to poorer performance most of the time. I would guess he makes that point 30-50 times, and often 2-3 times on the same page. This is just one example, but the book is filled with fluff such as this.

There are also plenty of mistakes and awkwardly worded passages that make reading the book difficult. Many of the diagrams and examples could have been better chosen so as to reduce confusion.

So why did I give it 2 stars instead of 1? Well, there is *some* useful information in this book. I did learn some things from this book, but I'd like to stress that I don't think there is anything that I learned that I couldn't have learned from free sources on the internet. Take a look at http://www.phlonx.com/resources/nf3.php. In addition to that link, do a search on "Entity Relationship Diagram", and you'll have learned 95% of what is in this book.

I almost feel bad making such a critical review, but on the other hand, I feel bad that I spent money on this book. I wish I had another title to recommend to you, but I've got to go looking myself for a replacement for this book.

9 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Excellent reference!, December 17, 2005

By	Mr. Panah Mosaferirad "joshua_pan" (Philadelphia, Pa United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This book is an excellent medium-level introduction to Database design. As a programmer, I was never really taught how to design efficient DBs or rather the art of doing it effectively. Believe it or not working with databases is more than just using SELECT or UPDATE commands. I believe DB Design is for rather medium to advanced users. So, others complains about the level of this book is unfair and irrelevant in my opinion. But you be the judge of that.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Disappointing, February 25, 2009

By	A. Mandel (Massachusetts) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I'm a fairly technical person, but my knowledge of databases was superficial, so I decided to read this book. It is billed as suitable for the novice, and therefore should take things slowly and methodically.

It feels disjointed and poorly structured. The author seems to jump from one topic to the next. But probably the most significant problem is that the author uses terms and concepts before defining or describing them. I can only imagine how confused a true novice might be when reading some of this.

Examples:

He talks about Online Transaction Processing and Data Warehousing without really defining them or giving examples that would help the reader understand what they're used for.

On page 10, there is a figure purportedly showing what a relational database model looks like. However, it uses symbols and lines that he does not explain till later in the book. Without explaining the symbols, what good is the diagram?

Many places, he talks about normalization before explaining what it is. In one spot where he starts to explain normalization, he writes, "Normal Forms beyond 3rd Normal Form are often ignored and sometimes even 3rd Normal Form itself is discounted." He does not explain what a Normal Form is.It's just text that will have no meaning at all to the reader.

He talks about tables and columns before adequately explaining what they are.

In Chapter 3, he covers simple datatypes. First, he explains what a fixed length string is. But in his accompanying diagram, he uses SQL constructs to explain it. The first line of his explanatory diagram is:
SQL> select country||','||fxcode||','||currency

As anyone with programming experience could tell you, explaining what a fixed-length string is is pretty straightforward. But for some reason the author ties it to a complex SQL example, even before he has explained anything about SQL itself.

I almost gave up on the book, but slogged through to the end. It does get a little more understandable, yet I sometimes struggled to figure out just what the author was trying to convey. I found several mistakes, and there is an awful lot of needless repetition.

There seemed to be several cases where the author said things like:

It's probably a bad idea to ever do X, Y, or Z

And then explained how to do X, Y, and Z. It also felt like the author did things like:

Explain how to do T
Note that it was probably a bad idea to do T
Explain how to undo T

Do yourself a favor and look through the book before buying it. Perhaps you'll find it more readable than I have.