Efficient Database Design

Databases are a major foundation of the information age, but specifying their tables and fields can be a daunting challenge for designers. This paper presents a pedagogy that rapidly enables students to design small to medium sized systems. It recognizes that a database management system (DBMS) is a tool, and students must understand how the tool works before they can design something for its use. An example illustrates the concepts of entities and processes, tables, relations, indexes, and queries with a simple report generation problem. Then procedures are provided that make the design of databases more efficient by requiring fairly few changes as implementation progresses. Final steps include techniques for checking the quality of the design prior to implementation.