database design sites

[Emery Snyder vze2fmxp@xxxxxxxx]

> From:  Norman Bauman 
> -------------------
> Are there good websites on basic database design?
> -------------------

Hmm. This isn't really my specialty, but I've used some of these and
bookmarked the others for future reference:

http://www.utexas.edu/cc/database/datamodeling/index.html (basic,
good)

http://www.evolt.org/article/Beginning_Database_Design_Part_I/18/27137/
(basic, good)

http://seastorm.ncl.ac.uk/itti/design.html (another university site,
basic)

http://www.webmasterbase.com/article/378 (another introduction,
includes some normalization)

http://www.15seconds.com/issue/020522.htm
(basic, but dense, sort of technical, very good rules,
includes bibliography)

http://www.phpbuilder.com/columns/barry20000731.php3 (This is a good
article about normalization)

http://databases.about.com/cs/specificproducts/?once=true&; (many
articles; looks good but I haven't used it)

http://www.intelligententerprise.com/info_centers/database/ (journal
about databases, various articles)

links to articles on db design:
http://www.sqlteam.com/FilterTopics.asp?TopicID=100

-- Not about design, but about SQL (the standard way to query data):
http://sqlcourse.com/

http://www.redhat.com/docs/manuals/database/RHDB-7.1-Manual/sql/reference.html

At some point, there will be a tradeoff between elegance of design and
speed of lookup. It might be desirable to make "lookup tables" which
aren't really part of the basic entity relationship diagram, but speed
up performance (e.g. for a website). Also, most rdbm (relational
database management) software will do things like indexing (which
again involves performance tradeoffs I don't know about).

-- On software:

Oracle rules for high-volume, and it costs it (not for real people).

mySQL is good and free (but you need to understand some *nix to get
it working, and it's not robust enough to run a Fortune-500 company or
its website). The other open source option, postGRE SQL, supports
transactions like Oracle (which mySQL doesn't), but is supposedly
harder to use than mySQL. One of my summer projects is to set up each
and play with them, so perhaps I'll report back.

File Maker Pro is pretty sophisticated, and I've seen people do cool
things with the Mac version. (I don't know whether it could support a
website, but it's trying to; the newest version will output XML, for
instance.) It seems to offer general ODBC interfaces, including SQL,
but none of my friends have played with that yet.

People have run websites off of M$ Access, astonishingly enough. M$
SQLServer I've never tried.

Emery Snyder