What Is Database Design, Anyway?

Chapter 1. What Is Database Design, Anyway?

An earlier version of this essay appeared as a foreword to the book Oracle SQL Developer Data Modeler for Database Design Mastery, by Heli Helskyaho (Oracle Press, 2015). What follows is a revised and considerably expanded version of that foreword. My thanks to Heli and Oracle Press for allowing me to republish the essay here in its present form.

Databases lie at the heart of so much we do in the IT world that it’s surely obvious that they need to be properly designed. Yet design theory—meaning database design theory specifically, of course—doesn’t seem to be very well understood in the industry at large, and the same goes for design best practice also. You only have to look at the Wikipedia entry on database design to see the truth of these claims! In fact, before going any further, I’d like to quote a few sentences from that Wikipedia piece (with commentary by myself) as evidence in support of these claims:¹

• Database design is the process of producing a detailed data model of a database. This logical data model contains all the needed logical and physical design choices and physical storage parameters needed to generate a design....

  Comment: So the “logical data model” contains “physical storage parameters”? Clearly, somebody is confused here, and I don’t think it’s me. Note too the circular nature of the foregoing “definition” (doing database design apparently consists of producing the things needed for doing database design). The ...