Database Design

Introduction

We might have come across the word "Database" quite often. This term carries a high emphasis on its arms. More often, it is not just related to the developer's perspective but is quite often used with non-tech groups or communities. Technically, a database is more of a storage term used to denote the relationship with different forms of data that are coagulated in a single place. Thus, we can define a database as an organized collection of data, generally stored and accessed electronically through computer systems. This article is highly centric to the database design and its association with citable terms and methodologies was commonly taken into account. We'll be discussing those terms concerning database design to understand the bits and pieces. Let's talk about it straight away.

What is Database Design?

Database design can be generally defined as a collection of tasks or processes that enhance the designing, development, implementation, and maintenance of enterprise data management system. Designing a proper database reduces the maintenance cost thereby improving data consistency and the cost-effective measures are greatly influenced in terms of disk storage space. Therefore, there has to be a brilliant concept of designing a database. The designer should follow the constraints and decide how the elements correlate and what kind of data must be stored.

The main objectives behind database designing are to produce physical and logical design models of the proposed database system. To elaborate this, the logical model is primarily concentrated on the requirements of data and the considerations must be made in terms of monolithic considerations and hence the stored physical data must be stored independent of the physical conditions. On the other hand, the physical database design model includes a translation of the logical design model of the database by keep control of physical media using hardware resources and software systems such as Database Management System (DBMS).

Why is Database Design important?

The important consideration that can be taken into account while emphasizing the importance of database design can be explained in terms of the following points given below.

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1. Database designs provide the blueprints of how the data is going to be stored in a system. A proper design of a database highly affects the overall performance of any application.
2. The designing principles defined for a database give a clear idea of the behavior of any application and how the requests are processed.
3. Another instance to emphasize the database design is that a proper database design meets all the requirements of users.
4. Lastly, the processing time of an application is greatly reduced if the constraints of designing a highly efficient database are properly implemented.

Life Cycle

Although, the life cycle of a database is not an important discussion that has to be taken forward in this article because we are focused on the database design. But, before jumping directly on the designing models constituting database design it is important to understand the overall workflow and life-cycle of the database.

Requirement Analysis

First of all, the planning has to be done on what are the basic requirements of the project under which the design of the database has to be taken forward. Thus, they can be defined as:-

Planning - This stage is concerned with planning the entire DDLC (Database Development Life Cycle). The strategic considerations are taken into account before proceeding.

System definition - This stage covers the boundaries and scopes of the proper database after planning.

Database Designing

The next step involves designing the database considering the user-based requirements and splitting them out into various models so that load or heavy dependencies on a single aspect are not imposed. Therefore, there has been some model-centric approach and that's where logical and physical models play a crucial role.

Physical Model - The physical model is concerned with the practices and implementations of the logical model.

Logical Model - This stage is primarily concerned with developing a model based on the proposed requirements. The entire model is designed on paper without any implementation or adopting DBMS considerations.

Implementation

The last step covers the implementation methods and checking out the behavior that matches our requirements. It is ensured with continuous integration testing of the database with different data sets and conversion of data into machine understandable language. The manipution of data is primarily focused on these steps where queries are made to run and check