Re: The Real World of Databases

On Wed, 10 Nov 2004 16:14:31 +0000, Paul Wagstaff wrote:

> to become serious at database development, what are the primary skills
> needed?
[...]
> Any thoughts, references, books etc, will be gratefully appreciated.

Normalization, including the concept of functional dependencies, is rather important; I guess this uncontroversial.

I also think that theory about indexing (b-trees, hashing, etc.) is valuable - and not extremely hard. And I do believe that indexing falls into the domain of database development, unless your organization has very strict borders between development and database system administration.

The above subjects can be read about in any decent database textbook, like http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~dbbook/ and
http://www-db.stanford.edu/~ullman/dscb.html

Finally, I think it's important to learn how to use more than one specific RDBMS. This doesn't have much to do with science, but rather practical experiences and manual reading. For this subject, I find http://www.peachpit.com/bookstore/product.asp?isbn=0321118030 good.

-- 
Greetings from Troels Arvin, Copenhagen, Denmark