need help for planning software development , database design

Question

I have been doing a coding in for last 7 months. Most part of it has been the updations to the very poorly coded software in asp. Now I am going to redevelop entire software in asp.net. I want it to be very efficient. I need some tips and guidance about how to plan project and design a good database. Thanks in advance for help.

Answer 1

It's good that you ask, this is one of the most anti intuitive things in software development. My approach would be: pick one feature, implement it in ASP.NET, and convince your users to move over. You'll be surprised how many things you missed, or how actual performance compares to developer testing.

The quicker you iterate, the better your replacement project will be, and the less time you spend on things that don't really matter. There's a excellent blog post at Coding Horror about this; it's called Boyd's Law of Iteration.

Answer 2

As far as planning for the project is concerned you first need to create your application's pages on paper. Write all your ideas on the paper.

Draw each and every page on paper and complete it with your new ideas.

Then taking every page's feature into consideration draw the database tables. This is a very careful phase. So include every aspect of your application's functionality.

For designing the database follow these steps :

1. List all entities
2. Find Relationships [E-R matrix]
3. Draw Cardinality
4. Define Primary keys
5. Draw ERD
6. Eliminate many-to-many relationships
7. Identify attributes [attribute entity matrix]
8. Map attributes - only 1:1 with each entity
9. Draw final ERD

More help here
        Structured process you must know to develop a web application

Answer 3

Here's my super-quick spiel about database design.

A database is two things. It is a 'logical engine', and it is a 'physical engine'. It is a logical engine in that it allows you to create meaningful models of entities. It is a physical engine in that it processes bits of data to update or return results.

I suggest paying about equal attention to each of these aspects when designing a new system. To adress the first, work out the relational model and normalize as far as possible. To address the second, think about where you might want to denormalize for speed, what indexes you'll need to speed the processing, etc.