Chapter 1. Introduction

Database technology has evolved rapidly in the three decades since the rise and eventual dominance of relational database systems. While many specialized database systems (object-oriented, spatial, multim, etc.) have found substantial user communities in the science and engineering fields, relational systems remain the dominant database technology for business enterprises.

Relational database design has evolved from an art to a science that has been made partially implementable as a set of software design aids. Many of these design aids have appeared as the database component of computer-aided software engineering (CASE) tools, and many of them offer interactive modeling capability using a simplified data modeling approach. ...

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