Conceptual Database Design: An Entity-Relationship Approach

Conceptual Database Design: An Entity-Relationship Approach, 9780805302448 (0805302441), Addison Wesley, 1991

Database design is the process of determining the organization of a database, including its structure, contents, and the applications to be run. For a long time, database design was considered a task for experts, and was regarded as more of an art than a science. However, much progress has been made in database design, and it is now considered a stable discipline, with its own methods and techniques. Due to the spread of databases in industry and government spanning commercial and a variety of scientific and technical applications, database design is playing a central role in the information resource management of most organizations. Database design has also become a part of the general background of computer scientists, much like the ability of building algorithms using a conventional programming language.

Database design is normally done in three phases. The first phase, called conceptual design, produces a high-level, abstract representation of reality. The second phase, called logical design, translates this representation into specifications that can be implemented on and processed by a computer system. The third phase, called physical design, determines the physical storage structures and access methods required for efficient access to the contents of a database from secondary storage devices.

This book deals with the first two phases of database design, with a strong focus on the issues related to the user and the application rather than the system and a specific hardware/software environment. The conceptual and logical design phases can be performed independently of the choice of a particular database management system (DBMS). Therefore, it is assumed in the text that the knowledge of general database concepts and/or experience with DBMSs constitutes a common background for the reader.

We believe that a systematic and thorough execution of these early phases of design pays off immensely in the long term. In fact, many organizations are discovering the need to do conceptual and logical design at the same time as they move over to the relational and object-oriented database technology.

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