Health Data Clinic - Book 1: The Database Design Process

Good databases are planned, not typed. This book walks the four phases of design from end to end, using one clinic as the running example. You start by gathering requirements, separating what the system must do from how well it must do it, and learning three practical ways to listen to the people who will use the database. From there you sketch the conceptual design as entities, keys and relationships, then turn that sketch into logical tables with foreign keys that hold integrity in place and junction tables that resolve many-to-many links. The physical phase follows: choosing the right data type for each column, and adding indexes where speed actually matters. A chapter on being safe by design shows how protection belongs in the plan rather than bolted on later, and a closing review of best practices gives you a checklist you can carry into your own work.

Twenty-six A4 pages, in full color. Written in short sentences and plain English, for readers whose first language is not English and clearer for everyone else because of it.

Every query in this book was run against a live database before the page was printed, so the result you read is the result you get. Instant PDF download. By M.R. Sterling.