Database designer

From theory to practice: learning the secrets of relational database design

I’ve been teaching database design at Politecnico di Torino for almost twenty years, and I’ve seen the same pattern repeat every year: students learn the rules of the Entity-Relationship model, but struggle to understand why those rules exist and what happens when they’re ignored. Database designer comes from that observation — a book that walks through the design process step by step, from the conceptual model to the final relational schema, with the same teaching approach I use in the classroom.

It covers the whole design journey: entities, relationships, and attributes, internal and external identifiers, generalizations, and the restructuring and translation rules that turn a conceptual schema into a correct set of relational tables. The same reasoning behind designER, the tool I built to automatically apply these very principles.