Database Design for Mere Mortals®: A Hands-on Guide to Relational Database Design, Third Edition

Introduction

Plain cooking cannot be entrusted to plain cooks.

—COUNTESS MORPHY

In the past, the process of designing a database has been a task performed by people in information technology (IT) departments and professional database developers. These people usually had mathematical, computer science, or systems design backgrounds and typically worked with large mainframe databases. Many of them were experienced programmers and had coded a number of database application programs consisting of thousands of lines of code. (And these people were usually very overworked due to the nature and importance of their work!)

People designing database systems at that time needed to have a solid educational background because most of the systems they created ...