From: Coey Minear <cminear@...>
Date: 2008-12-09T00:45:13+09:00
Subject: Re: database design

One book that I would definitely recommend is "Mastering Data
Modeling" by John Carlis and Joseph Maguire:
http://www.amazon.com/dp/020170045X

(Full disclosure: my graduate database course was taught by John
Carlis, and he was my faculty advisor for my Masters project.)

The book's focus is on creating logical data structures (LDS), which
are diagrams of the data you are interested in tracking.  And from
that point of view, the book is beyond database-agnostic; the data
could be stored on index cards for all they care.  The point is to
make you think about what is important to be stored in the first
place, and how it relates to other data.  (One of the last chapters
does cover how to turn an LDS into a database schema.)

The book is extremely easy to read, and it has frequent "Story
Interludes" where the authors tell a story from their own experience
to help enforce a subject that was recently covered or to just give
some advice with making your own LDS's.  And if you are able to follow
the process with your own data, you don't have to worry about
"normalization", because the data will have normalized itself.


-- 
Coey Minear