Chapter 1 introduces the concept of MySQL, and discusses MySQL's growing popularity and its impact as a powerful tool. This chapter gives us a brief overview of the relational models and Codd's rules, which are required for designing purposes. A brief introduction to our case study—"car dealer" is provided at the end.

Chapter 2 shows how to deal with the raw data information that comes from the users or other sources, and the techniques that can help us build a comprehensive data collection. Also, this chapter covers the exact limits of the analyzed system, how one should gather documents, and interview activities for our case study.

Chapter 3 emphasises on transforming the data elements gathered in the collection process into a cohesive set of column names. The concept of data naming is also discussed in this chapter.

Chapter 4 provides the technique of grouping column names into tables. Rules for table layout, the concepts such as primary key, unique key, data redundancy, and data dependency are covered in this chapter.

Chapter 5 presents various techniques for improving our data structure in terms of security, performance, and documentation. The final data structure for the car dealer's case study is provided at the end.

Chapter 6 covers a supplemental case study about an airline system. This case study involves various steps such as gathering documents, preparing preliminary list of data elements, preparing a list of tables, sample values, and queries for the airline system.

Basic knowledge of SQL is required. Emphasis is made on the phpMyAdmin web-based interface for reproducing the examples, although the "mysql" command-line tool can be used. No knowledge of MySQL server administration or any specific operating system is required.

In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.

There are three styles for code. Code words in text are shown as follows: "In this case, we can add employee information, the employee code to the car_event table".

A block of code will be set as follows:

CREATE TABLE `event` (
`code` int(11) NOT NULL,
`description` char(40) NOT NULL,
PRIMARY KEY (`code`)
) ENGINE=MyISAM DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1;
INSERT INTO `event` VALUES (1, 'washed');

When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items will be made bold:

CREATE TABLE `event` (
`code` int(11) NOT NULL,
`description` char(40) NOT NULL,
PRIMARY KEY (`code`)
) ENGINE=MyISAM DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1;
INSERT INTO `event` VALUES (1, 'washed');

New terms and important words are introduced in a bold-type font. Words that you see on the screen, in menus, or dialog boxes for example, appear in our text like this: "It becomes impossible to link this "column" (for example the special paint color) to a lookup table".

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