Database Design for Mere Mortals™: A Hands-On Guide to Relational Database Design, Second Edition

Database-Design Methods

Traditional Design Methods

In general, traditional methods of database design incorporate three phases: requirements analysis, data modeling, and normalization.

The requirements-analysis phase involves an examination of the business being modeled, interviews with users and management to assess the current system and to analyze future needs, and an assessment of information requirements for the business as a whole. This process is relatively straightforward, and, indeed, the design process presented in this book follows the same line of thinking.

The data-modeling phase involves modeling the database structure using a data-modeling method, such as entity-relationship (ER) diagramming, semantic-object modeling, ...