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Grokking Relational Database Design
book

Grokking Relational Database Design

by Michail Tsikerdekis, Qiang Hao
March 2025
Beginner
280 pages
6h 5m
English
Manning Publications
Audiobook available

Overview

A friendly illustrated guide to designing and implementing your first database.

Grokking Relational Database Design makes the principles of designing relational databases approachable and engaging. Everything in this book is reinforced by hands-on exercises and examples.

In Grokking Relational Database Design, you’ll learn how to:

  • Query and create databases using Structured Query Language (SQL)
  • Design databases from scratch
  • Implement and optimize database designs
  • Take advantage of generative AI when designing databases

A well-constructed database is easy to understand, query, manage, and scale when your app needs to grow. In Grokking Relational Database Design you’ll learn the basics of relational database design including how to name fields and tables, which data to store where, how to eliminate repetition, good practices for data collection and hygiene, and much more. You won’t need a computer science degree or in-depth knowledge of programming—the book’s practical examples and down-to-earth definitions are beginner-friendly.

About the Technology
Almost every business uses a relational database system. Whether you’re a software developer, an analyst creating reports and dashboards, or a business user just trying to pull the latest numbers, it pays to understand how a relational database operates. This friendly, easy-to-follow book guides you from square one through the basics of relational database design.

About the Book
Grokking Relational Database Design introduces the core skills you need to assemble and query tables using SQL. The clear explanations, intuitive illustrations, and hands-on projects make database theory come to life, even if you can’t tell a primary key from an inner join. As you go, you’ll design, implement, and optimize a database for an e-commerce application and explore how generative AI simplifies the mundane tasks of database designs.

What's Inside
  • Define entities and their relationships
  • Minimize anomalies and redundancy
  • Use SQL to implement your designs
  • Security, scalability, and performance


About the Reader
For self-taught programmers, software engineers, data scientists, and business data users. No previous experience with relational databases assumed.

About the Authors
Dr. Qiang Hao and Dr. Michail Tsikerdekis are both professors of Computer Science at Western Washington University.

Quotes
If anyone is looking to improve their database design skills, they can’t go wrong with this book.
- Ben Brumm, DatabaseStar

Goes beyond SQL syntax and explores the core principles. An invaluable resource!
- William Jamir Silva, Adjust

Relational database design is best done right the first time. This book is a great help to achieve that!
- Maxim Volgin, KLM

Provides necessary notions to design and build databases that can stand the data challenges we face.
- Orlando Méndez, Experian

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Publisher Resources

ISBN: 9781633437418Publisher SupportPublisher WebsiteErrata Page