Database Design

Database design is a process that produces a series of database schemas for a particular application. The schemas produced usually include a conceptual, logical and physical schema. Each of these is defined using a different data model. A conceptual or semantic data model is used to define the conceptual schema, while a logical data model is used for the logical schema. A physical schema is obtained from a logical schema by deciding what indexes and clustering to use, given a logical schema and an expected workload for the database under design.

For every existing database, there is a design team and a design process that produced it. That process can make or break a database, as it determines what information it will contain and how will this information be structured.

The database design process produces a conceptual, a logical and a physical database schema. These schemas describe the contents of a database at different levels of abstraction. The conceptual...

Authors and Affiliations

1. Department of Computer Science, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada

   John Mylopoulos

Corresponding author

Correspondence to John Mylopoulos .

Editors and Affiliations

1. Georgia Institute of Technology College of Computing, Atlanta, GA, USA

   Ling Liu

2. University of Waterloo School of Computer Science, Waterloo, ON, Canada

   M. Tamer Özsu

1. Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ, USA

   Alexander Borgida

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