SQL Database Design Application

Why Model ?

Once upon a time, it was easy to run a business. You opened a storefront, inventoried picks, shovels, drygoods, sugar, canned goods, and, since you were the only business within reach, your customers were loyal, steady, and usually paid promptly.

Today, there are many competing forces requiring decisions to be made on a constant basis: changing customers with much more reach and mobility, changing buying habits, new products, competing products. Inventory requirements must be balanced against the cost of carrying the goods, and the risks of obsolescense. It is this very complex mosaic that makes good information the most important asset a business can have. The penalties for a wrong guess are prohibitively steep. Opportunities are lost; customers go elsewhere; markets dry up; tastes change; technology makes a product obsolete.

Using data to model the real world, and using your past experiences as guides for future plans is a much more effective, faster, and cheaper strategy.

Modeling the Many Moving Parts of a Business

Even the smallest business is the product of interaction between hundreds or thousands of participants. These participants are vendors, customers, assemblers, sales or finance people, transportation, marketing, manufacturing, or accounting folks - everyone who plays a part in the making and delivery of a product to the eventual customer.

At any point when these players perform a service, a transaction occurs which can be recorded to later help analyze the speed, success, or cost of that interaction. This needs to be done in a way that does not compromise the efficiency of the business.

Databases are by their nature rigid structures: a collection of data which are stored and indexed to facilitate lightning-fast access. That's the science. The problem is that in running a business, managers always need data presented in a very different way from which it is stored. Delivering that information in a usable way to management is art.

The techniques of gathering, joining,filtering, selecting, formatting, presenting, questioning data from these different sources and fitting them into meaningful reports and conclusions is what makes for good database design. Successful database applications are the finessed melding of the technology of database management with the art of design, and with an understanding of the realities of the real world of business.