Creating your MySQL Database: Practical Design Tips and Techniques

Data as a Resource

Before examining the various techniques available for design, let's think about the concept of data itself.

Organizations and enterprises use many assets, for example buildings, furniture, brains, but perhaps the most valuable asset is information or data. We remark that data documents the enterprise's procedures, and binds people into an ongoing exchange of information, called information flow. Computers help to formalize this data but we have to remember that it exists by itself.

But this is my Data!

When building data designs, we have to meet users and understand the enterprise's data flow. In an ideal world, every department, including the IT department, and every user would collaborate in order to help data flow easily between ...