Appendix C. Modeling and Designing Relational Databases

Planning and designing a database is the essential first step to developing a web database application. In this appendix, we introduce database modeling and the techniques to convert a model into the SQL statements needed to create a database.

This appendix isn't intended to replace a course or book on relational databases. Modeling requirements with an entity-relationship model requires both patience and experience. Instead, we detail our thought processes in a case study that models the winestore requirements and converts these to SQL CREATE TABLE statements. Pointers to resources on modeling and database design are included in Appendix E.