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Good Database Design Books?
OneC0de writes "I am the Director of IT for a small/medium sized marketing company, where I personally write the code that runs our applications. We use a variety of technology at our office, the majority of which rely on MS-SQL and MySQL databases. I am familiar with tables, SQL queries, and have a general understanding of how the SQL databases work. What I'm looking for is a good book, particularly a newer book, to explain general database design techniques, and maybe explain some relational tables. We have some tables that have million of rows, and I'd like to know the best method of designing these tables."
We have some tables that have million of rows, and I'd like to know the best method of designing these tables.
I'm a developer, not a database expert. But it seems that every now and then I have to get my hands dirty with data modeling. "The best method" is probably a really vague concept. If you have serious hardware constraints than the best method changes from an easily maintainable system to something more complex. There's give and take in database design and I guess a million rows is really something that a traditional relational database should be able to handle. So I'd suggest any book that teaches data modeling will suit you here. I happened to learn on Data Modeling Essentials which was decent but not great. I have heard good things about Len Silverston's growing series that concentrates more on patterns. But really what you're going to want is a book on data modeling or analysis that teaches you the orders of normal form, when to use cross reference tables, etc so you can get a better idea of good modeling standards. At a million rows, you might not find the need to refactor if you read about the new best practices but perhaps you could make a business case to eventually migrate.
Now there are other topics that require entirely separate books because they are such a diverging path from relational databases. It's not common but your database can be based on something other than an object or table. If you consider the internals of Google, perhaps BigTable is the most prolific database implementation out there and while interesting, it is sort of a very specific proprietary database implementation. You could take this approach to tailor your company's database to be precisely what you need but this would clearly be overkill in your case. You don't talk about any bottlenecks or impending loads that need to be carefully considered so instead of treading down this path, I suggest you first take a course on MySQL or get the de facto book on whatever database you use and play around with fine tuning on a test system. A lot of DBs out there allow you to tune them through a configuration file so that your particular needs are met more closely. If you're looking for this sort of continuing education just out of curiosity, pick up a book on database design and start to tinker. But it requires a lot of knowledge and effort to start a database technology from scratch and compete with vanilla out of the box technologies like MySQL and PostgreSQL.
From what information you provide in your question, I'd suggest this book to help you understand database designs more via industry proven patterns. That assumes you have all the basic database design practices covered.
My work here is dung.
Database in Depth: Relational Theory for Practitioners
Publisher: O'Reilly Media; 1 edition (May 1, 2005)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0596100124
ISBN-13: 978-0596100124
Best DB book i have ever owned/read/seen!
I'm the article poster. Our company is relatively small, with an IT staff of less than 5, and total company size less than 50. I write all the code, simply because none of our other IT pros are comfortable enough writing it. If there were "coders" under me to ask, please believe I would use them as a resource first.
He was asking for a book, not your stupid criticism.
IMHO: Joe Celko's SQL for Smarties (http://www.amazon.com/Joe-Celkos-SQL-Smarties-Programming/dp/0123693799/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books) has shown itself to be very nice book when the need to go beyond the basics to a little deeper understanding of SQL is needed.
There are many other books on the subject all the way to source material from Date and Dodd but Celko seems to be well informed and writes fairly well, I think.
"I am the Director of IT for a small/medium sized marketing company, where I personally write the code that runs our applications. We use a variety of technology at our office, the majority of which rely on MS-SQL and MySQL databases. I am familiar with tables, SQL queries, and have a general understanding of how the SQL databases work. What I'm looking for is a good book, particularly a newer book, to explain general database design techniques, and maybe explain some relational tables. We have some tables that have million of rows, and I'd like to know the best method of designing these tables."
There is more to RDBMS than tables and SQL. Your developers should understand data normalization first and foremost, at least 1NF, 2NF and 3NF.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Database_normalization
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_normal_form
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_normal_form
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_normal_form
The examples in the URLs above should suffice for getting a general understanding on how to start with a relational model. As for books, I'd suggest these:
http://www.amazon.com/Relational-Database-Design-Implementation-Third/dp/0123747309/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1278630155&sr=8-4
http://www.amazon.com/Information-Modeling-Relational-Databases-Management/dp/0123735688/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1278630306&sr=1-3
I would also suggest C.J. Date's "Database in Depth: Relational Theory for Practitioners", but I can imagine the local penny arcade l33t-hax0r-wannabe crowd going batshit crazy about studying relational algebra and relational database theory in depth. To each his own. Most problems that arise in poorly designed relational database models arise from not understanding data normalization
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HTH.
These three lessons may not all be in any one book, but they can help in the real world:
1) Learn what SQL Injection is and how to defend against it. It will ruin your day and could severely damage your current employment situation.
2) Abstract your schema from your front-end applications. Stored procedures are easy to write and can provide security and if well written stop injection attacks. They will let you change your database design without breaking your deployed apps. Just update the internal code in the P. Middleware and objects can do this, too.
3) Bergstrom's law of sailing says: "You can get away with anything in less than 5 knots of wind." Similarly, any little box or blade with 2 to 4 gs of RAM can easily handle 5 to 10 million row tables. Dedicate the server to MySQL or MS SQL so they can cache and buffer efficiently and they will outperform much bigger boxes trying to run too many schemas and DBs concurrently. Learn to index. Don't be too puritanical about normalization. Returning a customer address should require 6 joins. And remember that moving that moving large recordsets across the LANWAN may take much more time than the server query.
You probably already know all this... but maybe someone else reading this doesn't.
"Knowing everything doesn't help..."