There are some mistakes can be done within the database design process that can lead to the money and time excessive costs for the company or its clients.

We want to share with you such kinds of mistakes in order to predict their arising in your design process. But they are not exhaustive and avoiding these mistakes won’t lead to the perfect database design but we hope will help to improve this process.

Data types must have a precision without any excuses

If you want to avoid a needless money spending and huge amount of data storage, you need to define precision of data types. But it doesn’t necessary for some data types. Besides, there is no need to insert a negative value.

Working relationship between developers and designers

Communication between designers and developers is necessary to improve data design process.

If you have any confusion in your design process, try to talk to the developer. He or she probably could help you to find the right solution faster.

Communication must have a place but don’t overdo

If you are designer don’t forget about your direct mission: saving data from the applications’ mess. There are a lot of data without integrity, so don’t forget to adopt all the rules in order to protect it regardless apps robustness.

Surrogate & Natural Keys

A lot of users don’t know how to use surrogate and natural keys, despite on numbers of literary sources. For example, if you need to export the PK “TASK_NAME” into a parent table as a FK in various child tables everything is going fine. But if you need to rename the task there some problems can arise, such as updating millions of rows at every task, etc. So, you should add a “TASK_ID” into parent table and export it as FK.

Keep things under your control

The database can become full of items, such as views, tables, synonyms, etc. Thus once you defined the preferred naming convention, don’t forget to adopt it to the whole database, columns in order to keep SQL as readable as it possible.

Poor design

A good database must be created with forethoughts, proper care and attention which have given to the tiny details of the database. Unfortunately it is not possible to predict everything that will be needed to fulfill your design, but it is important to decrease a risk of potential arising issues.

This article was written by Andrew Smith, Marketing Manager at QArea Company. QArea specializes in custom software development and IT outsourcing services.

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