Beginning Database Design Solutions, 2nd Edition

8Designing Databases to Support Software

The previous chapters showed you how to gather user requirements, build a database model, and normalize the database to improve its performance and robustness. You learned how to look at the database from your customers' perspective, from the end-users' perspective, and from a database normalization perspective. But there's one other viewpoint that you should consider before you open your database product and start slapping tables together: the programmer's.

You might not be responsible for writing a program to work with a database. The database might not ever directly interact with a program (although that's rare). In any case, the techniques for making a database easier for a program to use often apply to other situations. Learning how to help a database support software applications can make the database easier to use in general.

In this chapter, you learn:

• Steps that you can take to make the database more efficient in practical use
• Methods for making validation easier in the user interface
• Ways to easily manage nonsearchable data

This chapter describes several things that you can do to make the database more program-friendly.

A few of these ideas (such as multi-tier architecture) have been covered in earlier chapters. They are repeated in brief here to tie them together with other programming-related topics, but you should refer to the original chapters for more detailed information.

PLAN AHEAD

Any complicated task benefits ...