Relational Database Design Training: Tools and Techniques

This Relational Database Design training course is designed to deliver the groundwork for building and working with relational databases — including Oracle, SQL Server, and MySQL — and enabling you to develop and use relational databases in your environment. You will learn to design your database to model your business requirements, normalise and denormalise data to optimise performance, and automatically generate database documentation using CASE tools. You will also learn how to simplify code and improve performance by avoiding common database design errors.

• Oracle's free SQL*Developer Data Modeler is used to design and generate a database
• PostgreSQL RDBMS along with the SQL Workbench/J IDE are used for database demonstrations and samples
• Concepts apply to any relational database environment

Relational Database Design Training: Tools and Techniques Delivery Methods

• After-course instructor coaching benefit
• Learning Tree end-of-course exam included
• After-course computing sandbox included

Relational Database Design Training: Tools and Techniques Course Benefits

• Extract core business data requirements from source documents
• Design both conceptual and logical data models using requirements
• Recognise and accurately model complex data relationships
• Apply data normalization methods to refine data models
• Physically deploy a relational schema from a logical model complete with tables, indexes, keys, and constraints

Relational Database Design Course Outline

An Overview of DBMS Technology

• How data is accessed, organised, and stored
• Relational and NoSQL database comparisons
• Roles involved in database design, development, and administration
• The database development process

How a Relational DBMS Works

Relational technology fundamentals

• Terminology and definitions
• Tables, attributes and relationships
• Primary and foreign keys
• Manipulating data: selection, projection, join, union, intersection, difference

Components of a relational DBMS

• An integrated, active data dictionary
• Databases, accounts, and schemas

Designing Data Models

A step-by-step approach and techniques

• Extracting core business information from requirements
• Generating conceptual data entities
• Transforming a conceptual model into a logical one
• Building a physical database from a logical model
• Building database documentation

Conceptual modelling

• Capturing core entities
• Identifying entity attributes
• Creating unique identifiers
• Graphically representing a conceptual model

Logical modelling

• Apply data types to entity attributes
• Describing relationships: one-to-one, one-to-many, many-to-many
• Building recursive relationships
• Understanding different modelling notations

Normalization Techniques

• Avoiding update anomalies
• Identifying functional dependencies
• Applying rules for normalization
• Normalising multi-valued attributes

Building a Relational Database

Physical database design

• Implementing keys from unique identifiers
• Building foreign keys from relationships
• Enforcing business rules with check constraints

Working with design software

• Generating the DDL to build the database
• Reverse engineering to capture the design of an existing database

Applying best practises to database design

• Natural versus surrogate keys
• Exploring lookup table deployment options
• Examine vertical and horizontal data partitioning strategies
• Using record timestamps