Data Modeling vs. Database Design
Just a quick, helpful little quote distinguishing the two.
Amplify’d from www.databaseanswers.org
Data modelling and database design are two very different activities. For data modelling, the question you are asking is : 1) What does the world being modelled look like ? In particular, you are looking for similarities between things. Then you identify a ’super-type’ of thing which may have sub-types. For example, Corporate Customers and Personal Customers
2) For database design, you are answering a different question:- how can I efficiently design a database that will support the functions of proposed application or Web Site. The key task here is to identify similarities between entities so that you can integrate them into the same table, usually with a ‘Type’ indicator. For example, a Customer table, which combines all attributes of both Corporate and Personal Customers. As a result, it is possible to spend a great deal of time breaking things out when creating a Data Model, and then collapsing them back together when designing the corresponding database.Read more at www.databaseanswers.org
