Basic Units for the Database Design Process

Abstract

Database design processes are getting complexer. Due to broadening application areas, complexity of size must be handled, and corresponding to powerful concepts within design languages, one has to deal with structural complexity. These sorts of complexities and the attempt to guarantee qualitative good design results lead to the development of a variety of support mechanisms for design processes. Besides developing specific design languages, different design methods or design tools, it remains still an open field to understand the complete database design process in detail.

For this reason, we propose an approach which describes the database design process in terms of its basic units: the design documents and the design tasks. Thereby, we differ from other process definition approaches by focussing on the definition of design documents instead of identifying process-oriented tasks and subtasks at first. For the description of the intended units, we choose a special graph structure, the DDGraph, which serves as a generic representation of design documents. Now, the DDGraph provides a language independent representation of design documents and supports a formal definition of the effect of the design tasks. Furthermore, it provides a lot of advantageous features for defining complete database design processes in the end.