Definition
Database design is a process that produces a series of database schemas for a particular application. The schemas produced usually include a conceptual, logical and physical schema. Each of these is defined using a different data model. A conceptual or semantic data model is used to define the conceptual schema, while a logical data model is used for the logical schema. A physical schema is obtained from a logical schema by deciding what indexes and clustering to use, given a logical schema and an expected workload for the database under design.
Key Points
For every existing database, there is a design team and a design process that produced it. That process can make or break a database, as it determines what information it will contain and how will this information be structured.
The database design process produces a conceptual, a logical and a physical database schema. These schemas describe the contents of a database at different levels of abstraction. The conceptual...
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American National Standards Institute. Interim report: ANSI/X3/SPARC Study Group on Data Base Management Systems. FDT Bull ACM SIGMOD. 1975;7(2):1–140.
Atzeni P, Ceri S, Paraboschi S, Torlone R. Database systems: concepts, languages and architectures. New York: McGraw Hill; 1999.
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Mylopoulos, J. (2018). Database Design. In: Liu, L., Özsu, M.T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Database Systems. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-8265-9_641
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-8265-9_641
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