Summary and Resources

In this article, I've discussed some general best practices when designing relational databases, including:

• The benefits of maintaining additional table attributes without any business meaning to serve as surrogate keys.
• The recommendation not to base the internal workings of the database on Universally Unique Identifiers.
• The use of a centralized type codes facility to express attributes with finite, predetermined ranges of values.
• Some considerations in designing complex datatypes to be used throughout the database schema.

In the next half of this article, I'll cover database normalization and some additional uses for a database within a project, like the use of history tables and event logs.

Resources

• Learn about the importance of the surrogate primary key when designing stable, flexible, and well-performing enterprise databases in Mike Lonigro's article, "The Case for the Surrogate Key."
  
  
• Read the book, Translucent Databases, as Peter Wayner offers a better, deeper protection paradigm for databases, one that works by scrambling the data with encryption algorithms, using the minimal amount of encryption that ensures the database is still highly functional.
  
  
• Search developerWorks' vast library for more than 1,000 articles on database design.
  
  
• Discover how DB2 Relational Connect helps with information integration by allowing several databases to be viewed and manipulated as one.
  
  
• Look at this white paper on Comprehensive, flexible backup and recovery for relational databases.