No label defined (Q4023862)

The book presents the theory and practice of database design. It develops the theory explaining the properties of good database schemas, and shows how good schemas can be designed using the entity-relationship model and the relational database model. The book consists of four parts. The first part is an introduction into database design. It presents basic definitions of data models, and discusses the properties a good database design should have. The entity-relationship model is the semantic data model used in the book. The semantics of the entity-relationship is described. The first part provide more advice on how the modelling concepts should be used to obtain a database schema that can be used without problems. The basic concepts of the relational model and also two query languages are defined. The book describes the basic concepts of the object-oriented data models too and discusses thier connection to the relational model. The book provides an intuitive motivation for some general design principles which to a certain degree are always applicable, no matter what data model is used. The second part concentrates on the relational model. It discusses different types of integrity constraints, studies the properties of integrity constraints and gives the axiomatizations for the important classes of functional and inclusion dependencies. The third part gives algorithms for mapping an entity-relationship diagram into a relational schema and vice versa. The fourth part defines concepts it can be used in producing fast algorithms for traditional design problems and also for generating example databases. The design methods explored within the book have been implemented within ``Design By Example'', a tool developed by the authors. Altogether it is a useful book for an undergraduate or postgraduate course in database design.