In the real world, the foundation of everything we think about and do is data. Our brains organize data by patterns, which is another way of saying sets. In the virtual world of programming, it’s still all about data. But now we have to build and manage the sets of data ourselves. We can and should use the SQL language as our means of communication, but even before that, we’ve got to make sure the data is organized so that it accurately captures entities and expresses the relationships between them. Skip or do a poor job at database design, and everything else in your application development process will suffer. Do it right, and everything that follows is more intuitive, easier to build, and much easier to maintain.

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