ASA Getting Started
Designing and Building Your Database
It is worth spending some time designing even the simplest database: what tables you will have, the keys that relate these tables, and so on.
Designing a database is not a difficult task for small and medium sized databases, but it is an important one. Bad database design can lead to an inefficient and possibly unreliable database system. Database applications are built to work on specific parts of a database, and rely on the database design, so a bad design can be difficult to revise at a later date.
Designing a large database is a complex task. There are formal approaches, such as conceptual data modeling, that help you to create efficient designs. Powerful tools, such as Sybase PowerDesigner and DataArchitect, enable you to apply these techniques to design and maintain large database designs.
This chapter does not attempt to tackle design issues for large databases. Instead, it helps you decide the kind of information you group together in a single table, and the way in which to think about and classify relationships between tables.
For an elementary look at the principles of database design, see Designing Your Database. For more advanced treatments, see the Sybase PowerDesigner documentation or a book devoted to database design.
This chapter assumes that you are familiar with the concepts of database tables, primary keys, and foreign keys.
For information on primary keys and foreign keys, see Relations between tables.