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Database Design

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  • First Online:
Encyclopedia of Database Systems

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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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Recommended Reading

  1. 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.

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  2. Atzeni P, Ceri S, Paraboschi S, Torlone R. Database systems: concepts, languages and architectures. New York: McGraw Hill; 1999.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, Univ. of Toronto, 40 St. George Street, M5S 2E4, Toronto, ON, USA

    John Mylopoulos

Authors
  1. John Mylopoulos
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Correspondence to John Mylopoulos .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Georgia Institute of Technology College of Computing, Atlanta, Georgia, USA

    Ling Liu

  2. University of Waterloo School of Computer Science, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada

    M. Tamer Özsu

Section Editor information

  1. Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ, USA

    Alexander Borgida

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© 2016 Springer Science+Business Media New York

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Mylopoulos, J. (2016). Database Design. In: Liu, L., Özsu, M. (eds) Encyclopedia of Database Systems. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-7993-3_641-2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-7993-3_641-2

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, New York, NY

  • Online ISBN: 978-1-4899-7993-3

  • eBook Packages: Springer Reference Computer SciencesReference Module Computer Science and Engineering

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