Introduction to Database Design with Entity Relationship (ER) Diagrams

Developer working with a database? Need to build a data-rich application but not sure how to design your DB? Did someone hand you a legacy DB app and now you have to modify the database schema?

This session will cover the basics of designing and setting up a database schema. We'll start with defining a few common business scenarios, build out some tables, create relationships and then go through usage, pitfalls, problems and design tradeoffs. As a veteran of many, many database-driven projects for consumer desktop software applications, websites and enterprise software systems, the database design plays a crucial role in the success of your project.

We'll run through some real-life examples and issues such as:

• Creating a new table
• Choosing data types
• Normalization (and when to denormalize)
• Types of relationships
• Referential integrity
• join/relationship tables
• 1-to-many, many-to-many
• ...and then how to actually use these structures in your application

Note: while the examples will focus on SQL Server, the techniques and SQL code will work for virtually any SQL database.

Please use the "Email Speaker" button to send me your questions, where you're at with DB design now, or any other material so I can tailor the presentation to your needs!