An Innovative Database Design Method

This article is intended to give you a single idea that we think is innovative and that you can hopefully use to spur on your design and development tasks and help you build a database system that will meet most if not all of your needs.

The Problems Encountered at the End of a Project

Toward the end of a project, just as you are about to go live with your new database system is often when things can go wrong forcing you to delay the introduction of your new database system.

For this reason, thinking ahead with the notion of meeting as many of the needs your company can use and preparing the ground work for documenting new requirements as they unfold and avoiding a troublesome ending should be at the forefront of your thoughts.

You can do something to prevent this from happing by planning ahead and by setting up an innovative method of documenting the design, development and deployment process with a separate dynamic database model.

The Solution

It all begins by documenting your new database feasibility study and your systems analysis effort and incorporating these documents into your final set of design notes that capture your business requirements, business logic and transactional data into the complete package.

The entire set of design notes could now be inserted into a separate database identified as the “Design Notes Metadata Database” or some similar title. Each table could relate to a major project phase such as requirements gathering, business data and logic collecting, table design and development, test data accumulation, testing, etc.

Each record within every table could relate to a feature of the new database and each field within that metadata record could describe a component of the feature. The record descriptions would remain intact through out the entire design, development, test, deployment and operation. They would in addition remain available for continual update and reference for new employees just becoming familiar with the application.

The entire process can contribute enormously to clarifying data during development and later when maintenance or troubleshooting needs to be performed, or new features need to be added. It would be a simple matter to query the metadata database and discover necessary information you can use to take the appropriate action.

Because all the design notes are embedded in a separate metadata database and because this represents a dynamic maintainable database that is updated during all phases of the project – you should not find yourself in trouble at the end of your project.