Foreword

Finally, here is a book that builds a bridge between academic database theory and creating databases in the real world. The book also provides essential information you need to take your database applications from design to implementation, such as up-to-date suggestions for fast-track database project documentation, for GUI-based user interface design for database applications, and for user training and documentation.

If you're building real-world databases to solve real-world problems, you'll find thorough, rigorous, and highly practical information about the craft of building database solutions. A plethora of real-world examples based on common SQL implementations are provided. Even true database geeks who "know it all" will find this book is a good refresher on current theory and practice.

Have you ever wondered what a theta join is? Or where you might use one? If you've never had formal database training and wonder what you might be missing, or just want to impress your coworkers with your rigorous theoretical database training, you'll find in this book a lot of practical information and techniques that arise from relational theory—information that you might not have learned even after years of experience.

Have you had a thorough academic training but want to know how to apply it in real-world scenarios? The departmental database conversion is due next week and the database system chosen for you doesn't implement the relational divide operator you desperately need for a key report. Here, you'll find out exactly what popular SQL implementations do and don't support, and discover techniques that fill the gap between theory and practice.

Ensuring that your completed design solves a real-world problem is often harder and more critical than the specifics of implementation. The second part of the book draws from Rebecca's hard-won experience building critical database applications for customers around the world. It provides practical advice and guidelines for working with your customers to ensure that you meet their real needs rather than what they think they need. It fills the gap between design and implementation by examining trade-offs between, for example, single-tier, two-tiered, and n-tiered architectures, and recent Internet innovations. It goes on to present administrative, security, and auditing topics, which are issues all too often left unaddressed until too late in the project.

The book doesn't stop with the database design. Practical and pragmatic suggestions on managing project lifecycle (and other buzzwords), and how to develop and communicate your evolving design with users and programmers, are presented. A variety of modern user interfaces for database applications are outlined with their pros and cons, as well as which specific Microsoft Windows controls map well to specific data types. Chapter 16, "Maintaining Database Integrity," is one of the most realistic, pragmatic, and user-focused treatments I've seen in any text. Rebecca's extensive database application building experience really shines through here. Last, but not least, the book provides a great description of how to help and train your users to succeed with your application by using modern techniques such as ToolTips, and tried and true, and perhaps forgotten, techniques like audible feedback and short-cut keys.

In summary, this book is a practical, pragmatic, and highly knowledgeable treatment of building real database applications in today's high-paced software development world, written by someone who's been there and done it. Anyone trying to build database applications will find it useful. Anyone trying to map database theory to practice will find it enlightening. And to top it all off, its written in a fun, refreshing style that makes it light and entertaining to read—something I would have thought impossible for a book about databases!

Michael Mee