- Paperback: 288 pages
- Publisher: Addison Wesley; 1 edition (23 May 2000)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0201485559
- ISBN-13: 978-0201485554
- Product Dimensions: 23.3 x 18.6 x 1.5 cm
- Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 969,800 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- See Complete Table of Contents
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More About the Author
Product Description
Amazon.co.uk Review
Fabian Pascal is a highly regarded writer, well known as a staunch defender of the relational model's virtue. His standing in the RDBMS community is illustrated by C J Date's forward. If E F Codd is the father of the relational model, Date is certainly its uncle. Pascal seeks to clarify areas of database implementation that frequently prove problematic. This is not a beginner's book but is aimed at the experienced reader wanting to understand more about the underlying relational model and to press that knowledge into service.
The issues range from normalisation, keys, duplicate rows and missing information to business rules and integrity enforcement, "unstructured" data and complex data types and quota queries ("what are the top ten best selling products?", for instance). Each chapter covers one issue and comprises an overview, how the issue is best addressed, a demonstration of the practical benefits, the pitfalls of not addressing it and any pertinent recommendations. It makes for interesting reading. The layout and style, however, can irritate. Pascal uses many quotations but persistently [wedges] in his [own] wording: "if the DBMS knows the [integrity constraints] for the input [base tables] and relational operators [that define the view]." He also gives each chapter its own bibliography, which is only a problem because he has also chosen to cite separately each article from the wonderful Relational Database Writings series by Date et al. It all begins to look horribly like padding and Pascal's undoubted erudition doesn't need it. By this reviewer's count, he makes 47 references to the four books in the series and 11 to his own 1993 publication; furthermore, the ludicrous situation arises where two citations, identical in all but footnote number, appear consecutively. Whatever happened to ibid.?
Despite these misgivings, this book is stimulating and informative for anyone in search of further enlightenment on the relational model. --Mark Whitehorn
Product Description
Databasics clearly explains the key concepts users and database professionals need to understand in order to build well-designed databases that answer business questions accurately and efficiently. Fabian Pascal, one of the industry's leading experts, identifies ten critical, recurring issues that both database users and vendors often fail to address appropriately. Pascal demonstrates why understanding these fundamentals is so important, providing detailed examples and solutions designed to help users escape the key pitfalls of database development. Among the topics covered: unstructured data and complex data types; business rules and enforcing data integrity; keys; duplicates; normalization; entity subtypes and supertypes; data hierarchies and recursive queries; redundancy; quota queries; and how to handle missing information. Along the way, Pascal offers no-holds-barred assessments of how well current SQL implementations and commercial products address each issue. Databasics, in short, is a complete guide to building databases right the first time, so they don't have to be rebuilt later. For all DBAs, developers, managers, and end-users that need to understand the best ways to design and implement database systems.
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Fabian Pascal writes with passion and intellect and does much to highlight the deficiencies of SQL and its popular commercial RDBMS implementations. The book reiterates all of the underlying principles of relational theory, illustrates how relational theory provides a data model more than capable of representing objects, and reinforces the need for separation of logical and physical design.
For anyone that works with an RDBMS product in detail, but never learnt relational theory, this should be an invaluable resource and will assist you in reviewing your own database implementations. For those of us that learnt relational theory from its roots in mathematical set theory, this is a valuable reminder of the principles that we may have lost sight of in pursuit of 'real-world' solutions.
Some chapters of the book are close to perfection - they (re-)establish the theory, assess the common 'workarounds', and then offer pragmatic, but elegant, solutions that address the problem without losing sight of the theory. In other parts, however, the only real solution offered is persistent requests to our RDBMS vendors, or the SQL standards bodies, to implement relational theory within their products.
Altogether, a useful addition to the library of any database designer / administrator: sidestep the occasionally jaundiced despair and gain insight through the eyes of a true relational great.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Didactic. Necessary.
Too many people are lost in database design and development without really understanding the principles of the relational database model. They imagine they can, must, make their own variations to: improve performance; incorporate the latest IT fashionable protocol or language; or they know better.
Pascal may seem to write in a harsh style but only to convey harsh lessons. The relational approach is useful because it addresses difficult and relevant problems with data storage and information extraction. An RDMS can (mostly) handle these issues only if the database design conforms to the model - take a design shortcut and you are back with managing data without it's help and forgoing it's advantages.
Read the stuff on-line. You should find it useful enough to want the book.
Format:Paperback
Pascal is a true master of his subject and has distilled a few lifetimes (including CJ Date's) of serious thinking about databases into a series of short digestable lessons.
In terms of style, the book is extremely well written and is highly normalised ;-) I often found myself spending a couple of minutes on a single sentence - this was great though - and part of the learning process. I would much rather do this than have to read through paragraphs of redundant text.
The book doesn't tell you everything you ever needed to know about databases, but instead gives you a deep understanding of the problems you face when modeling the real world on your computer and enables you to create elegant solutions for your tasks.
As a word of warning, Pascal's book is written from the perspective of how you should model data in an ideal world: using a perfect database language, having a superfast computer, and being a genius. I made my first serious database after reading his book and though it helped immensly, there are times now when I wouldn't take his advice - not because he isn't right - but because we don't live in that ideal world - and I might have to use Access!
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