Database Design and Development: A Visual Approach

Description

Features

The text that balances database theory, business problem solving, and hands–on–practice.  This book prepares student for the workplace without sacrificing rigorous academic theory. 

How do you move from theory to application?  Do you find students respond better to texts with more visual, step–by–step illustrations?

Visual Approach

• Students are taught to visualize the output prior to designing a database.  The examples are all well illustrated with multiple diagrams.  The diagrams appeal to the visual learner and allow visual comparisons between each step in the design or query.

What software packages do you use? Do you use different software platforms to illustration the key database applications?

Practical Multi–Platform Implementation

• Entire chapters on Oracle, SQL Server, and MS Access development environments all provide visual interfaces to create and query tables.  This allows faculty to tailor use of the book to their environment without developing new materials. 

OTHER POINTS OF DIFFERENTIATION

How do you emphasize that databases are the main engine behind e–commerce sites?

Extensive Use of E–Commerce Examples

• The Web builds interest since it is a natural attention draw.
• The rapid development of e–commerce means that there are real businesses online.  Students can experience real business problems rather than sanitized examples often found in textbooks.
• Businesses do not reveal their database design—students see only the front–end application for the database.  This challenges them to reverse engineer the underlying database by looking at the requirements of the front–end application—a true exercise in critical thinking.

Visual Studio/ASP.NET

• Databases are inevitably part of a larger system with multiple front end applications.  To speed application development we highlight Visual Studio/ASP.NET 2.0 so students are able to write application with little or no code. 

Do you evaluate the quality of in–text student resources in the text?

PEDAGOGICAL FEATURES:

• Conceptual focus: In each chapter we review several database concepts and then show how to design and implement using those concepts.
• Learning objectives: Each chapter begins with a list of objectives that, after studying the chapter, students should be able to accomplish. Given our active learning preference, the objectives are behavioral in nature.
• Multiple diagrams in each chapter: We show actual database tables to provide an example of the concept under review. The captions under the diagrams provide a useful visual review.
• Chapter summaries: Each chapter ends with a summary of its contents. While these summaries capsulize the chapter guts, they were not created so that students can read them in lieu of the chapter content.
• Key concepts and terms: Also at the end of each chapter is a list of important terms and concepts in the chapter. This will assist the student in checking for understanding.
• Review questions, discussion questions and design exercises: The review questions at the chapter end are aimed to facilitate recall of chapter concepts. The discussion questions are geared toward higher levels of learning such as synthesis and evaluation. The design questions integrate all levels of learning in a problem based format.