Practical Issues in Database Management: A Reference for the Thinking Practitioner

--C. J. Date Three decades ago relational technology put the database field on a sound, scientific foundation for the first time. But the database industry--vendors, users, experts, and the trade press--has essentially flouted its principles, focusing instead on a cookbook, product-specific approach, devoid of conceptual understanding. The consequences have been costly: DBMS products, databases, development tools, and applications dont always perform up to expectation or potential, and they can encourage the wrong questions and provide the wrong answers. Practical Issues in Database Management is an attempt to remedy this intractable and costly situation. Written for database designers, programmers, managers, and users, it addresses the core, commonly recurring issues and problems that practitioners--even the most experienced database professionals--seem to systematically misunderstand, namely: *Unstructured data and complex data types *Business rules and integrity enforcement *Keys *Duplicates *Normalization and denormalization *Entity subtypes and supertypes *Data hierarchies and recursive queries *Redundancy *Quota queries *Missing information Fabian Pascal examines these crit