Its not for professionals
This is an introductory college book. I would rate it a 3 for that but since professional is in the title I have to give it a one. The terminology differs significantly from that used in uml. A great deal of the book is spent explaining predicates, and done so poorly.The definition of domains is a little fuzzy
Uncomfortable with the style of writing
I read the previous reviews for this book and thought I was finally getting myself a well written book on this complex topic but alas, the book only caused much frustration.The writing style of the author is very annoying to say the least. The author assumes the reader is a "dummy" and tries hard to be funny. He fails miserably at it! After spending three weeks trying to read the book, I walked away being more confused about the concepts I already knew. This book is not worth it if you ask me.
One of the best and easiest to read in a LONG while!
This book is probably one the best books on data modelling I've had the privilege of reading. It very clearly lays out concepts that I personally have found difficult to understand from other texts. The manner is very down-to-earth and doesn't resort to academic-speak as many of these sort of texts have a tendancy of doing. His humour is well-placed, (not to mention nice to see! The author clearly doesn't take himself too seriously, and this helps his explanations tremendously!) I liked this book, and think you will too if you want something that will give you the basic tools to create a solid, dependable data store that will live into the future.
Clear, entertaining
Consice discussion of data normalization, easy to follow. Overall very good, but some of the examples are a little dated, and the CD won't run on my Mac.
A philosophy of data modeling
When I was faced with creating a data model for an entire system for the first time, I instructed myself from this book for the theory, and from "The Data Modeling Handbook" by Reingruber and Gregory for the implementation details. There are many books on databases, some of them huge, which cover the same old rules about the five normal forms, etc. What absorbed my interest in this book is that it described how to model a relational database using concepts which, to me, seemed somewhat object-oriented. This reasonably-sized book was a very readable, informative exposition of the practical theory to have in mind when conceptualizing a database. The database built with the advice from this book is still going strong today...it's robust, flexible and expandable. Some credit for that goes to the lessons learned from this book.
