Take Your Database Design Skills to a Whole New Level
Review by SQL-Server-Performance.com
Database Modeling and Design — Logical Design, Fourth Edition
By Toby Teorey, Sam Lightstone, and Tom Nadeau
296 pages. Morgan Kaufmann. $49.95.
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I read this book at practically the same time that I read Relational Database Design Clearly Explained. Naturally, I took the chance to switch between both books to compare how details are described. Based on this comparison Database Modeling and Design is the clear winner.
In this direct contrast, it was quite astonishing to note how differently the same facts can be linguistically expressed. One can use many words to express very little, but fortunately, this also holds true in the opposite direction where one can be spot on with only a few words. Although this book is generally on a higher level than the former book, the authors succeed in expressing themselves precisely and descriptively. The downside, however, is that this books isn’t so appropriate for real beginners anymore.
The book deals exclusively with database design on the logical level, with the physical level being discussed in a completely separate volume. This distinction actually makes a lot of sense, since it relieves the authors from the constraint of having to describe a topic within the narrow confines that other authors devote whole books to.
Table of Contents:
- Introduction
- The Entity-Relationship Model
- The Unified Modeling Language (UML)
- Requirements Analysis and Conceptual Data Modeling
- Transforming the Conceptual Data Model to SQL
- Normalization
- An Example of Logical Database Design
- Business Intelligence
- CASE Tools for Logical Database Design
- Appendix: The Basics of SQL
- Glossary
- References
- Exercises
- Solution to Selected Exercises
The only interfering factor regarding this book is the chapter on Business Intelligence. It could have been omitted. There are books with substantial coverage of the topic on the market. Nobody can seriously expect to provide an overview on the topic in just 40 pages.
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