Overview

There was a great debate at the annual ACM SIGFIDET (now SIGMOD) meeting in Ann Arbor, Michigan, in 1974 between Ted Codd, the creator of the relational database model, and Charlie Bachman, the technical creative mind behind the network database model and the subsequent CODASYL report. The debate centered on which logical model was the best database model, and it had continued on in the academic journals and trade magazines for almost 30 more years until Codd s death in 2003. Since that original debate, many database systems have been built to support each of these models, and although the relational model eventually dominated the database industry, the underlying physical database structures used by both types of systems were actually evolving in sync. Originally the main decision for physical design was the type of indexing the system was able to do, with B+tree indexing eventually dominating the scene for almost all systems. Later, other concepts like clustering and partitioning became important, but these methods were becoming less and less related to the logical structures being debated in the 1970s.

Logical database design, that is, the design of basic data relationships and their definition in a particular database system, is largely the domain of application designers and programmers. The work of these designers can effectively be done with tools, such as ERwin Data Modeller or Rational Rose with UML, as well as with a purely manual approach. Physical...