Database Book Reviews

Good databases start from good database designs. This page reviews several database design and implementation books. There are suggestions for new and experienced developers.

Philip and Alex’s Guide to Web Publishing by Philip Greenspun: A Top Ten Book List selection.; Philip is cranky, smart, and funny. His travel writings and photographs have been, at times, among the ten most visited sites on the Web. This book is a one-of-a-kind look at Web-database publishing from someone who actually knows what he’s talking about. You can read the book on-line if you don’t want a copy on paper. Visit that link when you have a few hours. I spent a couple of hours at the site when I first went there, and I don’t usually have time to surf. A real jewel. Review added March 2000.
Database Modeling & Design by Toby J. Teorey: The most detailed modern discussion of Entity Relationship (ER) diagrams I've found. The side-by-side comparison of models based on different syntaxes (Chen, crows-feet, UML, and IDEF) is particularly helpful. This book is useful if you are new to ER diagrams, or new to a certain syntax, or want a concise ER reference guide at hand. Review added January 2001.
Database Systems by Thomas M. Connolly and Carolyn E. Begg: This is a readable, well organized, and detailed review of database design, terminology, and applications. Topics covered include design, the relational model, normalization, client-server, n-tier, CASE, entity-relationship diagrams, SQL, security, transactions, distributed databases, object databases, OLAP, Data Warehousing, and Web-enabled databases. Highly recommended. Review added 1999.
Database Designs for Mere Mortals by Michael J. Hernandez: The title says it all. Database design is hard to learn because of the language typically used to discuss it. Mere Mortals uses ordinary language that any motivated reader can understand. This is an excellent first book on database design. Unfortunately, the book does not tie its language back into the traditional language and takes an unrealistically purist approach to summarized data. Otherwise, highly recommended. Review added 1999.
Building Scalable Database Applications by Peter M. Heinckiens: I hesitate to recommend this book because it gives me a competitive advantage ;-) This is the single best book I’ve found on designing and building high-performance and scalable databases. The book uses Object Oriented terminology and concepts, but everything but the final implementation details is applicable to non-OO systems. If you need to get up to speed on OO terminology, check the OOP Book Reviews page. Review added 1999.
4D Books by David Adams: If you are interested in 4D specifically, you should read The 4D 6.5 Companion and Programming 4th Dimension: The Ultimate Guide (written with Dan Beckett.) These products are available from Automated Solutions Group.

If you’re interested in database design, check out the Normalization Is a Nice Theory article in the Downloadable Papers page.
If you are specifically interested in the IDEF0 and IDEF1 standards, you can find the full standards documents in system modeling section of the Downloadable Standards page.

Read a great book lately? Send an email to dpadams@island-data.com.

Database Book Reviews

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