The Data Model Resource Book, Vol. 2: A Library of Data Models for Specific Industries

Data Modeling Essentials, Third Edition (Morgan Kaufmann Series in Data Management Systems) (The Morgan Kaufmann Series in Data Management Systems)

The Data Warehouse Toolkit: The Complete Guide to Dimensional Modeling (Second Edition)

The Data Warehouse ETL Toolkit: Practical Techniques for Extracting, Cleanin

Database Design

The Data Model Resource Book, Vol. 1: A Library of Universal Data Models for All Enterprises

Format: Paperback
Author: Len Silverston
ReleaseDate: 06 March, 2001
Publisher: Wiley
Rating:

The Resource Book is just that
Silverston's book addresses many of the issues we found ourselves wrestling with (in designing the CRM portion of the system for instance), and it presents options with the pros and cons of each. We ordered this book because we are about to begin designing a new information system for our company.

Two surprises I didn't like
The book comes with a CD. The text of this book was generally good - although it seemed padded out with a massive listing of model metadata. The first surprise was, the CD does not include the Data Definition Language (DDL) for its sample models. . . there's an extra cost for that. My question to the publisher would be, what good is the CD you provide for free?
The second surprise is the illustrations. There are plenty of them, but they look like they were done in a primitive graphics package - not in an enterprise modeling tool. They author seems to have invented his own wierd set of conventions, including "foreign keys do not appear in the entities. . . that is duplicate information". Before you buy this book, take a look at the illustrations of the models. If you can live with the notation, maybe consider buying it.

Good, but sometimes a little too "kitchen sink"
It definitely saves a lot of time and mistakes while data modelling which is one thing you better get right in your app as data migration to a new model both at the app and database level is often a time consuming and bug prone process. I like this book.

That being said the locked cd is a nuisance and sometimes the data model becomes almost ridiculously detailed. For instance in one part of the book the author talks about extending the person data model to include things such as the history of the person's gender (for instance if they had multiple sex changes). I have seen a lot of overbuilt data models that had lots of entities that were rarely used and contributed to a significant amount of clutter and generally overwhelmed developers with useless details and planning for corner cases that never happened.