Creating your MySQL Database: Practical Design Tips and Techniques

Table of Contents

Creating your MySQL Database: Practical Design Tips and Techniques

Credits

About the Author

About the Reviewer

0. Preface

What This Book Covers

What You Need for This Book

Conventions

Reader Feedback

Customer Support

Downloading the Example Code for the Book

Errata

Questions

1. Introducing MySQL Design

MySQL's Popularity and Impact

The Need for MySQL Design

What do I do Next?

Data Design Steps

Data as a Resource

But this is my Data!

Data Modeling

Overview of the Relational Model

Rule #1

Rule #2

Simplified Design Technique

Case Study

Our Car Dealer

The System's Goals

The Tale of the Too Wide Table

Summary

2. Data Collecting

System Boundaries Identification

Modular Development

Model Flexibility

Document Gathering

General Reading

Forms

Existing Computerized Systems

Interviews

Finding the Right Users

Perceptions

Asking the Right Questions

Existing Information Systems

Chronological Events

Sources and Destinations

Urgency

Avoid Focusing on Reports and Screens

Data Collected for our Case Study

From the General Manager

From the Salesperson

From the Store Assistant

Other Notes

Summary

3. Data Naming

Data Cleaning

Subdividing Data Elements

Data Elements Containing Formatting Characters

Data that are Results

Data as a Column's or Table's Name

Planning for Changes

Pitfalls of the Free Fields Technique

Naming Recommendations

Designer's Creativity

Abbreviations

Clarity versus Length: an Art

Suffixing

The Plural Form

Naming Consistency

MySQL's Possibilities versus Portability

Table Name into a Column Name

Summary

4. Data Grouping

Initial List of Tables

Rules for Table Layout

Primary Keys and Table Names

Data Redundancy and Dependency

Composite Keys

Improving the Structure

Scalability over Time

Empty Columns

Avoiding ENUM and SET

Multilingual Planning

Validating the Structure

Summary

5. Data Structure Tuning

Data Access Policies

Responsibility

Security and Privileges

Views

Storage Engines

Foreign Key Constraints

Performance

Indexes

Helping the Query Optimizer: Analyze Table

Accessing Replication Slave Servers

Speed and Data Types

Table Size Reduction

In-Column Data Encoding

Case Study's Final Structure

Vehicle

Person

Sale

Other tables

Summary

6. Supplemental Case Study

Results from the Document Gathering Phase

Preliminary List of Data Elements

Tables and Sample Values

Code Tables

Themed Tables

Composite-Key Tables

Airline System Data Schema

Sample Queries

Inserting Sample Values

Boarding Pass

Passenger List

All Persons on a Flight

Summary

Index

Creating your MySQL Database: Practical Design Tips and Techniques

Marc Delisle

Creating your MySQL Database: Practical Design Tips and Techniques

Copyright © 2006 Packt Publishing

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical articles or reviews.

Every effort has been made in the preparation of this book to ensure the accuracy of the information presented. However, the information contained in this book is sold without warranty, either express or implied. Neither the author, Packt Publishing, nor its dealers or distributors will be held liable for any damages caused or alleged to be caused directly or indirectly by this book.

Packt Publishing has endeavored to provide trademark information about all the companies and products mentioned in this book by the appropriate use of capitals. However, Packt Publishing cannot guarantee the accuracy of this information.

First published: November 2006

Production Reference: 1141106

Published by Packt Publishing Ltd.

32 Lincoln Road

Olton

Birmingham, B27 6PA, UK.

ISBN 10: 1-904811-30-2

ISBN 13: 978-1-904811-30-5

www.packtpub.com

Cover Image by www.visionwt.com

Credits

Author

Marc Delisle

Reviewer

Rudy Limeback

Development Editor

Louay Fatoohi

Assistant Development Editor

Nikhil Bangera

Technical Editor

Mithil Kulkarni

Editorial Manager

Dipali Chittar

Project Manager

Patricia Weir

Indexer

Bhushan Pangaonkar

Proofreader

Martin Brooks

Layouts and Illustrations

Shantanu Zagade

Cover Designer

Shantanu Zagade

About the Author

Marc Delisle is a member of the MySQL Developers Guild, which regroups community developers—because of his involvement with phpMyAdmin. He started to contribute to this popular MySQL web interface in December 1998, when he made the first multi-language version. He has been actively involved with the phpMyAdmin project since May 2001 as a developer and project administrator.

He has worked since 1980 at Collège de Sherbrooke, Québec, Canada, as an application programmer and network manager. He has also been teaching networking, security, Linux servers, and PHP/MySQL application development.

I would like to thank the whole Packt team for their support, especially Louay Fatoohi and Nikhil Bangera; their advice helped shaping this book. My thanks also go to Rudy Limeback for his insight.

The developers of the MySQL software have earned my respect; may they find here my warm gratitude for their excellent product.

I hope that this book will assist readers into building effective data structures.

To Carole, André, Corinne, Annie, and Guillaume, with all my love.

About the Reviewer

Rudy Limeback is an SQL Consultant with close to 20 years of experience using SQL in one database system or another. He is located in Toronto, Canada but, thanks to the miracle that is the Internet, consults for clients all over the wide world.More information on SQL and Web development can be found on Rudy's website, http://www.r937.com/.

Chapter 0. Preface

MySQL, launched in 1995, has become the most popular open source database system. The popularity of MySQL and phpMyAdmin has allowed many non-IT specialists to build dynamic websites with a MySQL backend. This book is a short but complete guide showing beginners how to design good data structures for MySQL. It teaches how to plan the data structure and how to implement it physically using MySQL's model.

What This Book Covers

Chapter 1 introduces the concept of MySQL, and discusses MySQL's growing popularity and its impact as a powerful tool. This chapter gives us a brief overview of the relational models and Codd's rules, which are required for designing purposes. A brief introduction to our case study—car dealer is provided at the end.

Chapter 2 shows how to deal with the raw data information that comes from the users or other sources, and the techniques that can help us build a comprehensive data collection. Also, this chapter covers the exact limits of the analyzed system, how one should gather documents, and interview activities for our case study.

Chapter 3 emphasises on transforming the data elements gathered in the collection process into a cohesive set of column names. The concept of data naming is also discussed in this chapter.

Chapter 4 provides the technique of grouping column names into tables. Rules for table