Book Image

Creating your MySQL Database: Practical Design Tips and Techniques

By : Marc Delisle
Book Image

Creating your MySQL Database: Practical Design Tips and Techniques

By: Marc Delisle

Overview of this book

For most of us, setting up the database for an application is often an afterthought. While you don't need to be a professional database designer to create a working application, knowing a few insider tips and techniques can make both the process easier and the end result much more effective. This book doesn't set out to make you an expert in data analysis, but it does provide a quick and easy way to raise your game in this essential part of getting your application right.
Table of Contents (12 chapters)

Naming Recommendations


Here we touch a subject that can become sensitive. Establishing a naming convention is not easily done, because it can interfere with the psychology of the designers.

Designer's Creativity

Programmers and designers usually think of themselves as imaginative, creative people; UI design and data model are the areas in which they want to express those qualities. Since naming is writing, they want to put a personal stamp to the column and table names. This is why working as a team for data structure design necessitates a good dose of humility and achieves good results only if everyone is a good team player.

Also, when looking at the work of others in this area, there is a great temptation to improve the data elements names. Some discipline in the standardization has to be applied and all the team members have to collaborate.

Abbreviations

Probably because older database systems had severe restrictions about the representation of variables and data elements in general, the...