Java™ Oracle® Database Development

Designing a Database

Let's design a database for our CD collection. Assume that, until now, we've been keeping all the information about our CDs on index cards and that, for each CD, we've written down the artist's name, what country the artist is from, the title of the album, the release date, the label, and a list of the songs on the album. We want to convert this system of cards into an Oracle database.

Based on our index cards, we first design a table with the following columns, omitting for now the list of songs:

					CD_COLLECTION
  TITLE
  ARTIST
  COUNTRY
  RELEASE_DATE
  LABEL

Our database table is shown in Figure 2-1.

Figure 2-1. CD database table.

Notice that, to identify each CD uniquely, we can use the combination of the two columns TITLE and ...