Fully revised and updated, Relational Database Design, Second Edition is the most lucid and effective introduction to relational database design available. Here, you'll find the conceptual and practical information you need to develop a design that ensures data accuracy and user satisfaction while optimizing performance, regardless of your experience level or choice of DBMS. Supporting the book's step-by-step instruction are three case studies illustrating the planning, analysis, and design steps involved in arriving at a sound design. These real-world examples include object-relational design techniques, which are addressed in greater detail in a new chapter devoted entirely to this timely subject. * Concepts you need to master to put the book's practical instruction to work. * Methods for tailoring your design to the environment in which the database will run and the uses to which it will be put. * Design approaches that ensure data accuracy and consistency. * Examples of how design can inhibit or boost database application performance. * Object-relational design techniques, benefits, and examples. * Instructions on how to choose and use a normalization technique. * Guidelines for understanding and applying Codd's rules. * Tools to implement a relational design using SQL. * Techniques for using CASE tools for database design.

After a long period of research, development, test and trial, relational database management systems are at last being marketed in force. The feedback from early installations of these systems is overwhelmingly positive. The most frequent comment by users is that productivity has been increased by a significant factor (from 5 to 20 times what it was using previous approaches). Another comment is that, in many cases, end users can now handle their own problems by direct use of the system instead of using application programmers as mediators between them and the system. As the reputation of relational systems for ease of use and enhanced productivity has grown, there has been a strong temptation for vendors of other approaches to exploit the label "relational" somewhat indiscriminately. In some cases the label is being misapplied to a whole data system; in others it is being misapplied to an interface. It is therefore worth developing criteria which database management systems (DBMSs) should have in order to be called "relational". The Relational Task Group (RTG) of the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) undertook such an effort by developing a characterization of RDBMSs and analyzing fourteen DBMSs per this characterization. The result of this work is presented in this book. The conclusions of the RTG are in agreement with my view that a DBMS should not be called "relational" unless it satisfies at least the following conditions: 1. All information in the database is represented as values in tables.

Addressing important extensions of the relational database model, including deductive, temporal, and object-oriented databases, this book provides an overview of database modeling with the Entity-Relationship (ER) model and the relational model. The book focuses on the primary achievements in relational database theory, including query languages, integrity constraints, database design, computable queries, and concurrency control. This reference will shed light on the ideas underlying relational database systems and the problems that confront database designers and researchers.

Relational Databases explores the major advances in relational databases and provides a balanced analysis of the state of the art in relational databases. Topics covered include capture and analysis of data placement requirements; distributed relational database systems; data dependency manipulation in database schemata; and relational database support for computer graphics and computer aided design. This book is divided into three sections and begins with an overview of the theory and practice of distributed systems, using the example of INGRES from Relational Technology as illustration. The following chapters focus on whether relational and relational-like systems actually meet business needs; IBM's Structured Query Language/Data System (SQL/DS); tools for database design and programming; and Secondary Access Methods and the problem of secondary index selection. A number of quantitative models for assessing the performance of physical databases are also described. This text concludes by assessing some of the most conspicuous trends in relational database research and development. This monograph will be of interest to database designers.

The traditional vertical decomposition methods in relational database normalization fail to prevent common data anomalies. Although a database may be highly normalized, the quality of the data stored in this database may still deteriorate because of potential data anomalies. In this paper, we first discuss why practitioners need to further improve their databases after they apply the traditional normalization methods, because of the existence of functional entanglement, a phenomenon we defined. We outline two methods for identifying functional entanglements in a normalized database as the first step toward data quality improvement. We then analyze several practical methods for preventing common data anomalies by eliminating and restricting the effects of functional entanglements. The goal of this paper is to reveal shortcomings of the traditional database normalization methods with respect to the prevention of common data anomalies, and offer practitioners useful techniques for improving data quality.

Information Modeling and Relational Databases, Third Edition, provides an introduction to ORM (Object-Role Modeling) and much more. In fact, it is the only book to go beyond introductory coverage and provide all of the in-depth instruction you need to transform knowledge from domain experts into a sound database design. This book is intended for anyone with a stake in the accuracy and efficacy of databases: systems analysts, information modelers, database designers and administrators, and programmers. Dr. Terry Halpin and Dr. Tony Morgan, pioneers in the development of ORM, blend conceptual information with practical instruction that will let you begin using ORM effectively as soon as possible. The all-new Third Edition includes coverage of advances and improvements in ORM and UML, nominalization, relational mapping, SQL, XML, data interchange, NoSQL databases, ontological modeling, and post-relational databases. Supported by examples, exercises, and useful background information, the authors' step-by-step approach teaches you to develop a natural-language-based ORM model, and then, where needed, abstract ER and UML models from it. This book will quickly make you proficient in the modeling technique that is proving vital to the development of accurate and efficient databases that best meet real business objectives. "This book is an excellent introduction to both information modeling in ORM and relational databases. The book is very clearly written in a step-by-step manner and contains an abundance of well-chosen examples illuminating practice and theory in information modeling. I strongly recommend this book to anyone interested in conceptual modeling and databases." — Dr. Herman Balsters, Director of the Faculty of Industrial Engineering, University of Groningen, The Netherlands - Presents the most in-depth coverage of object-role modeling, including a thorough update of the book for the latest versions of ORM, ER, UML, OWL, and BPMN modeling. - Includes clear coverage of relational database concepts as well as the latest developments in SQL, XML, information modeling, data exchange, and schema transformation. - Case studies and a large number of class-tested exercises are provided for many topics. - Includes all-new chapters on data file formats and NoSQL databases.

Optimize Your Chemical DatabaseDesign and Use of Relational Databases in Chemistry helps programmers and users improve their ability to search and manipulate chemical structures and information, especially when using chemical database "cartridges". It illustrates how the organizational, data integrity, and extensibility properties of relational dat

An early vision in Computer Science was to create intelligent systems capable of reasoning on larg¬e amounts of data. Independent results in the areas of Semantic Web and Relational Databases have advanced us towards this vision. Despite independent advances, the interface between Relational Databases and Semantic Web is poorly understood. This dissertation revisits this early vision with respect to current technology and addresses the following question: How and to what extent can Relational Databases be integrated with the Semantic Web? The thesis is that much of the existing Relational Database infrastructure can be reused to support the Semantic Web. Two problems are studied. Can a Relational Database be automatically virtualized as a Semantic Web data source? The first contribution is an automatic direct mapping from a Relational Database schema and data to RDF and OWL. The second contribution is a method capable of evaluating SPARQL queries against the Relational Database by exploiting two existing relational query optimizations. These contributions are embodied in the Ultrawrap system. Experiments show that SPARQL query execution performance on Ultrawrap is comparable to that of SQL queries written directly for the relational data. Such results have not been previously achieved. Can a Relational Database be mapped to existing Semantic Web ontologies and act as a reasoner? A third contribution is a method for Relational Databases to support inheritance and transitivity by compiling the ontology as mappings, implementing the mappings as views, using SQL recursion and optimizing by materializing views. Ultrawrap is extended with this contribution. Empirical analysis reveals that Relational Databases are able to effectively act as reasoners.