Three decades ago relational technology put the database field on a sound, scientific foundation for the first time. But the database industry--vendors, users, experts, and the trade press--has essentially flouted its principles, focusing instead on a "cookbook," product-specific approach, devoid of conceptual understanding. The consequences have been costly: DBMS products, databases, development tools, and applications not only don't always perform up to expectation or potential, but they can encourage the wrong questions and provide the wrong answers.

Practical Issues in Database Management is an attempt to remedy this intractable and costly situation. Written for database designers, programmers, managers, and users, it addresses the core, commonly recurring issues and problems that practitioners--even the most experienced database professionals--seem to systematically misunderstand, namely:

Unstructured data and complex data types Business rules and integrity enforcement Keys Duplicates Normalization and denormalization Entity subtypes and supertypes Data hierarchies and recursive queries Redundancy Quota queries Missing information