PHP and PostgreSQL: Advanced Web Programming

5.4. Modeling Techniques

Defining a model of your data is the first step when building a new application. If the structure of your database is not flexible enough and if it cannot be extended easily, your entire application will suffer. After an application has been built, it is hard to change the structure of the database it is based on. Therefore it is worth the effort to think about the database model extensively. In the past few decades, a lot of people have been thinking about the right ways to build database models. In this section you will find out about the basics of building database models. A topic like modeling data can never be covered sufficiently, but we will try to guide you through the most important models and to show you what ...