As a junior programmer I think it may be beneficial to learn solid database design. What books would you recommend on learning database design? Just to be clear, the specific aspect of design I am referring to is creating a collection of tables and their relationships.
Note: The programming books I have enjoyed reading (gaged by teaching style, depth, and accuracy) are: CLR via C#, C# in a Nutshell, Framework Design Guidelines (by Krzysztof Cwalina; Brad Abrams), and C# in Depth.
This may help you:
Publisher: APress Published: 17 January 2007 Format: Paperback 240 pages
I've used Fundamentals of Database Systems by Elmasri and Navathe. It helped immensely.
work with someone that is much better than yourself, and try to understand what and why they do things their way. Be open to their input and suggestions.
If you're interested in a very theoretical approach to database design, you may want to check out The Third Manifesto or The Database Relational Model: A Retrospective Review And Analysis—both by Chris Date.
I read Beginning Database Design: From Novice to Professional last summer in preparation for my current job. It's a good, readable, and relatively general overview of database design patterns and heuristics. It's based around SQL, but mentions other technologies.
I took my first steps into databases trying to hack MySQL using MySQL and mSQL, which is now out of print. The introductory chapters to that book were where I was first exposed to the concepts of normalization and relations, which are important to any well-defined database; they were written in a pretty easy-to-understand way, IMO.
Later during college I took a relational algebra class, and that class, coupled with the fundamentals I learned reading the opening chapters of that book really helped me fully understand how to design database schemas.
Now I'm not saying you should get this book and magical understanding will come your way -- far from it. In fact, you can probably be better helped by reading wikipedia, but if you happen to stumble on it and read the first few chapters, it'll help when you start delving deep with some of the other, more advanced topics.
A couple of interesting reads to get you started (although I second the book recs as database design is complex and really needs to be looked at in depth)
You can't really understand database design until you get into the subject of performance tuning. There is so much bad design in databases becasue poorly performing choices were made at the design level where better choices are known but the designer didn't think about using them or worse wanted a more "elegant" solution. Solutions that look good to object oriented programmers are often the worst possible choices for a database. I highly recommend that after you read the design books that you look up some performance tuning books onthe database of your choice. Performance tuning is usually different for every database product, so you must read for the products you are going to use.
Try this video with the great Barry Williams, no need to read a 500 pages book:
http://databaseanswers.ning.com/video
"How a schema is built step by step"
About a book .. Database Design for Mere Mortals: A Hands-On Guide to Relational Database Design by Michael J. Hernandez is the best to begin with.
Practice makes perfect.
I haven't read many db books, but working with good specialists and with different projects I've got enough practice to make databases for medium sized projects. Of course, I can't touch in database specialists, whose life is somewhere between tables :-)
The Manga Guide to Databases is actually a surprisingly comprehensive (and fun) introduction to the topic.
One thing I've found is that relational database normalization theory is surprisingly helpful when you apply it to data structure design. It's a rigorous application of the "Don't Repeat Yourself (DRY)" principle to your data.