Relational Database Design, Tools and Techniques

Relational Database Design Training: Tools and Techniques

This Relational Database Design training course delivers the groundwork for building and working with relational databases — including Oracle, SQL Server, and MySQL — and enables you to develop and use relational databases in your environment. You will learn to design your database to model your business requirements, normalize and denormalize data to optimize performance, and automatically generate database documentation using CASE tools. You will also learn how to simplify code and improve performance by avoiding common database design errors.

You Will Learn How To:

• Extract core business data requirements from source documents.
  
• Design both conceptual and logical data models using requirements.
• Recognize and accurately model complex data relationships.
• Apply data normalization methods to refine data models.
• Physically deploy a relational schema from a logical model complete with tables, indexes, keys, and constraints.

Prerequisites

Before taking this course, you should already have basic knowledge and experience using a relational database and SQL.

Course Outline

Module 1: An Overview of DBMS Technology

• How data is accessed, organized, and stored
• Relational and NoSQL database comparisons
• Roles involved in database design, development, and administration
• The database development process

Module 2: How a Relational DBMS Works

Relational technology fundamentals

• Terminology and definitions
• Tables, attributes, and relationships
• Primary and foreign keys
• Manipulating data: selection, projection, join, union, intersection, difference

Components of a relational DBMS

• An integrated, active data dictionary
• Databases, accounts, and schemas

Module 3: Designing Data Models

A step-by-step approach and techniques

• Extracting core business information from requirements
• Generating conceptual data entities
• Transforming a conceptual model into a logical one
• Building a physical database from a logical model
• Building database documentation

Conceptual modeling

• Capturing core entities
• Identifying entity attributes
• Creating unique identifiers
• Graphically representing a conceptual model

Logical modeling

• Apply data types to entity attributes
• Describing relationships: one-to-one, one-to-many, many-to-many
• Building recursive relationships
• Understanding different modeling notations

Module 4: Normalization Techniques

• Avoiding update anomalies
• Identifying functional dependencies
• Applying rules for normalization
• Normalizing multi-valued attributes

Module 5: Building a Relational Database

Physical database design

• Implementing keys from unique identifiers
• Building foreign keys from relationships
• Enforcing business rules with check constraints

Working with design software

• Generating the DDL to build the database
• Reverse engineering to capture the design of an existing database

Applying best practices to database design

• Natural versus surrogate keys
• Exploring lookup table deployment options
• Examine vertical and horizontal data partitioning strategies
• Using record timestamps