I need a book to teach someone about basic database design. They don't need relational algebra or calculus, and they don't have to be an expert about highly optimized storage, indexing, or anything like that. They just need some basic normalization, column type selection, and query help for what should be a pretty simple database.
They took a college class on RDBMSes, but the class and accompanying book were both terrible. The book from my class is great, but is more complex than what they want and need. I'm aware of the Dummies and Idiot series books, but I would prefer to avoid those, if possible.
I'd rather not give them something tied to a specific tool (since they haven't selected the tool they are going to use), but as long as the tool is not Access it's ok if the book is vendor-specific. We'll probably end up using Postgresql or SQLite for the actual database, but won't be doing anything that should require special features provided by either of those databases.
Does anyone have any recommendations?
6 comments:
Check out "The Art of SQL" from O'Reilly. Might be too technical though.
I have a copy of "The Art of SQL" (I should do a review). It's a really good read, but way over the head of a beginner like my target reader.
You might want to try something like "Head First SQL" It came out long after I learned SQL, but it seems to me to have a reasonable learning curve.
Thanks, Mark, Head First SQL looks like it might be a good introductory text.
I see it's been a year since the original post so I certainly hope the lady has found a suitable book by now. But I'd like to add my recommendation for any one browsing more recently: "A Sane Approach to Database Design". Okay, I'm biased: I'm the author. In "Sane Approach" I try to take the reader through the essentials of database design in simple language. My goal in writing is to make the material understandable to the reader, not to impress the reader with how smart the author must be. The book is sprinkled with real-life examples of bad design to illustrate key points. It covers the basic database objects -- entities, relationships, attributes, and keys -- redunancy, naming conventions, and of course normalization.
That sounds like an interesting approach. I clicked through to check out the preview, but can't seem to get Lulu to give me anything. Have you considered just posting a chapter or two on your own site?
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