Relational Database Design

In this series of videos, we will cover key concepts and best practices for designing a relational database. Many problems that arise in using databases can be traced back to poor initial design. We will walk through the entire design process, from initial concept, through the design phase, ending with a fully functional database. This course is not platform specific; however, some concepts are demonstrated with Access on Windows operating system.

[MUSIC] Hello everyone, and welcome to Relational Database Design. I'm your show host, Vonne Smith, and in this course overview, we're gonna be going over, well, exactly what is covered in this series. What do I need to know before I get started. Who is the target audience, yes, I flipped that in order, but that's okay. I'll be covering both of them and any extra things that I need to know about. So why don't we go ahead and get to our topics that we are going to be covering. We're gonna start off with the very beginning and the basics of, hey, what exactly is a relational database? What is a primary key, what is the relationships, and we're going to be identifying key terms and definitions. We're also going to move into the world of data normalization. A very important topic and concept to understand and be able to really know what it's all about when you're starting to create the data for your database. And we're gonna talk about first normal forms, second normal form, and third normal form. Have some really good examples of showing how you go through that particular process. And we're gonna move into talking about our design of our database. We're going to be declaring a statement of purpose, like what exactly are we doing here? Why are we doing it? And just writing it out in plain English. And from those sentences in the way that we're going to describe things, we're going to determine what our tables are going to be. Maybe even determine what our primary keys are going to be. And it's really just the thought process behind, hey, I need a database, where do I start? Now we're gonna move into the database models. We're gonna be taking pen to paper, yep, we're gonna go old-school and actually draw out boxes and write out the fields, and how do they all relate to each other. To really just kinda visualize what this whole relational database is going to look like. And we're gonna do some translating. We're gonna go from what I would call normal talk, how we talk in a logical way, to let's go ahead and move it into and translate into a designer view. Like what are the actual relationships going to look like and use some of that notation that database people are going to understand. So normal to database talk is going to be covered in that particular area. And then we're gonna just go over some finalizing issues that we need to clean things up a little bit before we actually start implementing that database into whatever RDMS system. That would be our relational database management system. We're gonna talk a lot about data integrity. So what is integrity? It's being strong. And that's why we need to make sure that everything in our database does hold up and to be able to actually perform what we want the data to do. So we're gonna start off to talk about entity integrity, and that would be at the table level. We'll also talk about referential integrity, and not would be at the relationship level. And in that particular place we're gonna talk about cascading updates and delete, cascade deletes and cascade updates, and why they are so important and what you need to know about them. And then we're gonna spend a decent amount of time in domain integrity. And that's where we're going to really determine how we can make some really cool things using access as our example for different drop downs. Making sure that people can only input the particular information that I want into those particular fields within our tables of our database. And we're gonna end on some query basics just talking about the SQL structured query language. And writing out some very simple commands and actually getting into a fairly complex one to just be able to test their data, make sure we have some basics, and understanding behind how do we query our database? So lots of fun in there. And you have a special guest. You are going to have the subject matter expert of Mike Rodrick, who really loves databases. So it's a really great series and we have a lot of fun talking about all of these wonderful topics. So who is this for? This is really for anybody that wants to learn more about database fundamentals? And this is a great starting point. Now, this is something that maybe you've delved in, delved a little bit into access but you didn't really have like that introduction course. So this is a great place to come back maybe if you have a little bit of experience in any type of relational database management systems that you wanna kinda come back and learn the basics and the fundamentals. Fundamentals behind what's going on behind your, maybe current database that you're using. Do you need to know anything? Actually, no. This is a great introduction course. So we'll talk a lot about the concepts and really solidifying those ideas in your head to be able to understand. Because it's kinda like talking in a different language. There's a whole set of terminology and concepts to understand. Maybe you have an idea for database, or you've been tasked with creating a database for your company. This is a great place to start but you don't really need to know anything before you take this particular course. Now in most of our OfficePro.TV courses, you have exercise files that you follow along with as I go through the lessons and you can go step-by-step. This course is a little different. This is more of a theoretical course. We talk a lot about concepts and ideas, and walk you through the thought process. So there's not as many step-by-step files or demonstrations for you to follow along with. That being said, we do have some notes and some diagrams that we use throughout this show, available to you and some of the Excel files, a sample database, some of the Excel files that we're using. So you can use that, you do have access to them. They're all available here in this overview. We don't have them broken up into individual episodes for you to be able to download in each episode. So this is the place to get them and of course, contact us if you have any questions or if anything is missing. And I did take a quick little screenshot of the structure, because unlike some of the other exercise files, they are organized by topics. So you can see that these are the topics that we went through. Cuz there might only be a couple files on each topic, even though we might have five to six episodes within that topic. Okay, so these are just to supplemental information that we use throughout the show that you do have the availability to use on your own. And lastly, this is not an Access course. We do use Access as our demonstration for, or our tool to demonstrate these concepts of a relational database design. So that is a separate show. So I don't want you to think that you have to know access within this. And we do emphasize along the way that in your RDMS of choice, it might be a little bit different because, again, this is more of a topic and a theory level course rather than a show-do type of course. And of course, there's always other options in anything. We use certain words and terminology you might hear it being refer to differently in maybe in other tutorial or maybe with the people in your office. And there's many different ways that come to the same end point when you're talking about databases. So just keep your options open, there's tons of information on the Internet. So always go out and search for answers. If you've got, we say something that you wanna know a little bit more about. Go ahead and just put it into whatever search engine you like, and I'm sure you'll find plenty of other options there to be able to emphasize some of those points or just reiterate some of those things that you might need to know. Everybody uses databases for different reasons. And while we're talking about like, the perfect way to make a database, your company might not have it set up that way. And everybody uses things differently. So just keep an open mind when it comes to that. And of course lastly, just try to have a little fun with this. We have a lot of fun in these episodes. I can say this is probably one of my favorite courses because one, I was the host. [LAUGH] So it was nice to just kinda take a different perspective and be the student, and I learned a lot. So I hope you learn a lot and I hope you have fun with us, and we will see you soon. [MUSIC]