Database Design and Relational Theory: Normal Forms and All That Jazz

© C. J. Date 2019

C. J. DateDatabase Design and Relational Theoryhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4842-5540-7_18

What Is Database Design, Anyway?

C. J. Date¹ 

(1)

Healdsburg, California, USA

 

Official designs are aggressively neuter,The Puritan work of an eyeless computer

—John Betjeman:The Newest Bath Guide (1974)

An early version of this appendix appeared as a foreword to the book Oracle SQL Developer Data Modeler for Database Design Mastery, by Heli Helskyaho (Oracle Press, 2015), and a revised and considerably expanded version of that foreword subsequently appeared on the O’Reilly website (http://www.oreilly.com/data/free/what-is-database-design-anyway.csp). But it struck me that it would serve very well in the present book as a kind of broad overview ...