Chapter 9. The Design Process

In Parts 1 and 2, we looked at the principles of relational and dimensional database design. But the structure of the data is only one component of a database systema critical component, obviously, but still only a single component. Beginning with this part, we'll look at some of the remaining aspects of designing database systems.

In this part, we'll discuss most of the activities involved in the analysis and design of database systems, including the definition of system parameters and work processes, the conceptual database model, and the database schema. The design of the user interface, because it is such a complex topic, will be discussed in Part IV.

I'll be examining only the analysis and design of database systems here; implementation lies outside the scope of this book. But analysis and design can't exist in isolation from the rest of the process, so we'll begin with a brief discussion of project life cycles.