Database Design

Whenever you are working with a relational database management system such as MySQL, the first step in creating and using a database is to establish the database’s structure. Database design, aka data modeling, is crucial for successful long-term management of your information. Using a process called normalization, you carefully eliminate redundancies and other problems that will undermine the integrity of your data.

The techniques you will learn in this chapter will help to ensure the viability, performance, and reliability of your databases. The specific example I will work with—a content management system for storing Web links—will be more explicitly used in Chapter 11, “Example—Content Management,” but the principles of normalization ...

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