Database Design

Abstract

Database design methods, like many other design methods, rely on visualizations of an abstraction of the database. We already discussed data abstraction in the context of the constraint data model in Section 4.4.3. The visualization produced by database design methods may be considered to be at the view-level of the abstraction hierarchy.

One database design method that captured wide attention in databases is the entity relationship diagram method, which is discussed in Section 15.1. Entity relationship diagrams describe many aspects of the database but say little about how the database is going to be queried. However, databases and software engineering may increasingly merge in the future because more and more data processing is expected to be performed by the database before comminicating the query result to the rest of the computer software that uses the database. Hence it seems likely that the analysis of more powerful databases, such as constraint databases, needs to be done similarly to the analysis of programs done in software engineering. Constraint automata, which are related to transition systems in software engineering, form an attractive design method for constraint databases. Section 15.2 describes constraint automata.