Re: Newbie/Student - help in assignment

I hope you are not cheating on this assignment, because I know for a fact your professor reads all these news groups. (The number of cross-posts you made is very suspicious!)

Your question sounds like:

1. You have been missing classes
2. OR you did not buy the course textbook
3. OR you are doing some kind of survey of life in the trenches.

Assuming Item 3 is your motivation, here is one veteran's answers:

1. If you are referring to object development, always bottom-up, starting with tables and data normalization. If you are referring to "concept" or overall design, this is determined by the real-world objects I am trying to model into the database, such as the structure of the business organization, the people involved, the work routines they use, and so forth. So I guess you could say this is a top-down approach.
2. There are a lot of design tools for modeling a data structure. I do not use any of them. I take a very simple approach: Every real-world object is a table, and every real-world attribute of that object is a field in the table. Every real-world object has a natural relationship to another real-world object. These are the table joins.
3. Assuming one already has the knowledge and tools required to build a database application, the biggest problem for me is understanding the business I am trying to model. Not only does each business have unique problems, but each has its own style of doing business, its own rules, even its own names (nomenclature) for everyday things. If I built databases only for retailers or manufacturers, for example, after a while I could build them with my eyes closed. But when I have to be a lawyer, doctor, and Indian chief from one day to the next, it can be quite a challenge.

Don P. Mellon
PS: Sorry, no personal eMail service, not ever.

Tonny <tonnyw_at_hotmail.com> wrote in message news:37b3d4e9_at_news.hawaii.rr.com...
> I am doing a mini assignment for my Database Theory class. I would like
ask
> any DBA of this newsgroup to please with me with my assignment by
answering
> the following simple questions:
>
> 1. In develping your database, do you use
> a. top-down approach
> b. bottom-up approach
> c. other strategy
>
> 2. How do you build you data model?
>
> 3. What are the biggest problems usually encountered in developing a
> database?
>
> Please respond to my email: tonnyw_at_hotmail.com
>
> Thank you so much.
>
> Tonny
>
>
Received on Fri Aug 13 1999 - 12:34:32 CDT