The final numbered post in this version of my “pillar” series of posts ends in the most contestable part of the design/implementation process.  Encapsulation. The concept of encapsulation is not contested (or even contestable by sane programmers in any field of the art of system creation. Every time you use a Windows API call you are ...

I guess eventually I had to admit that performance matters. Whenever I speak, and in all of my books, I try to stress over and over that performance is NOT the only thing. The fact is all too much time is spent trying to make database applications run faster when the real goal should be to architect data structures that solve the problems of the ...

With the previous post on the fourth pillar, I have reached the “end” of the design posts.  To review, these were: Coherent – cohesive, comprehendible, standards based, names/datatypes all make sense, needs little documentation Normal – normalized as much as possible without harming usability/performance (based on testing) ...

This blog probably won’t stir up a hornet’s nest or anything, but I would also expect that it would be the least popular in practice. The person who feels they can disagree with the need for a reasonable amount of documentation is probably nuts. In the first post, I defined documented as “Anything that cannot be gathered from the previous four is ...

This one should be simple to anyone who sees it (once I decode what I mean by fundamentally… and sound…by then for sure!) In the initial post I defined this as – fundamental rules enforced such that you don’t have to check datatypes, base domains, relationships, etc.  The gist here is that you at a minimum don’t have to spend all of your time ...

The first pillar was easy, since no reasonable person is going to argue that having a design that is not coherent is desirable. No matter what the type of system, any design that isn’t easy to understand is likely to be a bad design (obvious caveats are that it must be understandable to other people of a given level of intelligence in the given ...

One of the definitions on wiktionary.org for coherence is “a logical arrangements of parts”. In my initial post, I defined “coherent” for database designs in the following manner: cohesive, comprehendible, standards based, names/datatypes all make sense, needs little documentation.  Both definitions share one specific common theme: ...

Before I get started with the pillars of a well built database, I want to reply (in long form) to a comment on the last post. I see the phases of the project to have five distinct phases (again trying to make memorable lists that an stick in your mind): Requirements – The process of extracting what needs to be done from the mind of the people ...

As I am starting the process of writing my next edition of the database design book (over the next 3+ years) I am starting to try to come up with some catchy way of stating that a database is well designed and implemented.  So I started to think of some metaphor and pillars is the best I could do. Catchy? Dunno, but the idea is that without ...