Information Modeling and Relational Databases, 2nd Edition

16.1. Introduction

Section 2.4 included an overview of the information systems life cycle. So far, we’ve focused on the stages of this cycle that deal with the conceptual and logical design of the data. We’ve seen how to perform conceptual data modeling using ORM, ER, or UML, and applied the Rmap algorithm to map a conceptual schema to a relational database schema. We’ve discussed database manipulation using SQL and XML, modeled business processes and states, and applied conceptual schema transformations and lower level optimizations to improve the efficiency of relational designs.

This chapter discusses other aspects and recent trends related to modeling and querying information systems. We’ll be covering a lot of ground, so the treatment of ...