9.6 Summary 175
9.6 Summary
We’ve presented a few different strategies for the order of selecting design attributes.
Some are better than others depending on your environment and the size and complex-
ity of the system you are designing. The complex interactions between the design fea-
tures mean that human designers will not be able to consider them in combination in a
single design step. As a result, whatever design a human expert develops has a high
probability of not being the absolute best theoretical design possible—and that’s com-
pletely fine. The goal of the database designer should be to ensure that the database is
running well, that the resources are well used, and that applications are not suffering
from deleterious performance issue. If ...