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Reviewer: Sergio Ilarri

Databases are a key part of information systems. This interesting book provides a practical introduction to databases within the global context of business systems development. The book is divided into five parts, including 14 chapters, and three appendices. Part 1, "The Context of Database Management," contains a single chapter, "The Database Environment and Development Process," which presents the basic concepts of databases, including an overview of the database development process, starting with enterprise data modeling. Part 2, "Database Analysis," consists of two chapters. "Modeling Data in the Organization" describes business rules and the classical entity-relationship (E-R) model. It presents the basic concepts of entities and relationships (cardinalities, simple and composite attributes, derived attributes, and so on), as well as notions such as strong and weak entity types and associative entities. "The Enhanced E-R Model" covers extensions to the basic model, notably supertype/subtype relationships (generalization/specialization). This chapter also introduces the technique of entity clustering (used to simplify the representation of E-R diagrams for presentation to specific user groups and easier management) and the use of patterns (prepackaged data models) for database design. Part 3, "Database Design" is divided into two chapters. Chapter 5, "Logical Database Design and the Relational Model," presents the relational database model, including the process used to transform the conceptual (E-R) schema into a relational schema, and normalization theory (covering the first, second, and third normal forms). It also discusses the problems that arise when merging relations (view integration problems). "Physical Database Design and Performance," chapter 5, focuses on the physical design of databases (denormalization, data partitioning, indexes, join indexes, hash index tables, clusters, and so on). Part 4, "Implementation," comprises four chapters. Chapter 6, "Introduction to SQL" presents the basic constructs of SQL, such as creation of tables, views, queries over single tables, and the use of GROUP BY. "Advanced SQL" focuses on more advanced capabilities of the SQL language, including joins, subqueries, correlated subqueries, conditional expressions, commands for transaction management, data dictionary facilities, triggers, procedures, and functions. "Database Application Development," chapter 8, examines the concepts of application partitioning; client/server, two-tier, and three-tier architectures; and Web applications and Extensible Markup Language (XML). Chapter 9, "Data Warehousing," introduces data warehouses and typical data warehouse architectures, emphasizing the importance of data warehousing as a key competitive advantage for companies. Part 5, "Advanced Database Topics," includes five chapters. Chapter 10, "Data Quality and Integration," highlights the importance of data quality as an organization-wide responsibility, and introduces the topic of data integration. The authors consider this chapter "a major step forward in database management textbooks." This is followed by "Data and Database Administration," on the functions of database and data administrators. Among other topics, it addresses security, backups and recovery, and basic aspects of concurrency control. For the remaining chapters (12 to 14), only a short overview is provided in the printed version of the book, with full versions available on the textbook's Web site. Chapter 12 is on "Distributed Databases," chapter 13 discusses "Object-Oriented Data Modeling" with unified modeling language (UML), and chapter 14 covers "Using Relational Databases to Provide Object Persistence." The three appendices offer additional material, including a comparison of different E-R notations, additional normal forms (mainly, the Boyce-Codd normal form and the fourth normal form), and a list of some basic data structures (stacks, queues, sorted lists, trees, and so on). The style of the book is very pedagogical, although compared to other books on databases, this one does not attempt to present the concepts in a very formal way. The writing style is clear, and frequent examples are used to illustrate the different topics. Specific advice and guidelines are offered, even though one may disagree with some of them (for example, regarding the use of single-attribute nonintelligent keys). Each chapter begins with a list of learning objectives and ends with a nice summary, a list of key terms, review questions, problems and exercises, field exercises, a list of references and Web resources, and exercises and questions associated with a larger case study (Mountain View Community Hospital). The authors also make extra material-for both teachers and students-available online, including videos related to some of the topics considered. This is an interesting book, especially if used in conjunction with some classical books on databases offering comprehensive coverage of all the conceptual aspects of databases, including implementation details for database management systems. A new 11th edition of this book [1], which (among other updates) will introduce topics such as NoSQL databases and cloud computing, has been recently published, according to the publisher's Web site. Online Computing Reviews Service