Data Modeling Made Simple, 2nd Edition: A Practical Guide for Business and IT Professionals (Take It With You)

As a computer science graduate, this book was a breath of fresh air. It was easy to understand, and actually an enjoyable read. It covered many of the topics I learned in school in my data modeling class, but it laid them out in an easier to understand, Real world example, business oriented way. I found that the best part of this book is the step by step approaches the author takes to building a Subject Area Model (which is very useful in the business world in modeling everything), and the Scorecard he provides to rate and grade the models. All the terminology is explained and the book does a really great job at refreshing your memory if you need to review basic concepts. Overall, I would recommend this book to other computing students and professionals alike, especially ones in the field of business. This book will be the most useful to you if you are trying to model business needs or data, or if you are trying to gather data to build a database.

The basis of all web development , desktop or app is a good modeling database and this book is perfect to understand that. La base de todo desarrollo web, de escritorio o app es un buen modelado de base de datos y este libro es perfecto para entender eso.

I lead a data architecture team at a consulting company. For all of my people who are learning or growing in the art of data modeling, I recommend this book. In my opinion, this author is one of the most skilled at teaching data modeling. Most folks who teach this topic get very technical and academic, therefore not very engaging. That's not Steve.

This excellent book delivers on its promise. That promise is to provide a readable and accessible approach to the vital business process of data modeling. Hoberman has accomplished this admirable task within the corpus of this important text better than any other author I've ever encountered. And I've been involved in logical data modeling and relational database design for now over twenty-five years. Here is my most emphatic endorsement of this important book. I intend to disseminate the teachings of this book to as many interested parties as are willing to learn. Hoberman has accomplished a huge and terribly important task in support of the craft of data modeling. And I intend henceforth to sing his praises in this regard. I would now strongly recommend this important book to any business person whose responsibilities include, or are in any way related to, effective logical data modeling and relational database design. God bless.

This book starts out with great potential but doesn't quite achieve its value proposition. You get a decent theoretical foundation, but right at the point where the rubber should hit the road the book moves on to random topics. I'm a software developer and needed concrete advice on modeling, nullability, joins, when and where to index, etc. Nope. For example, it describes many-to-many relationships and models them with an additional lookup table, but never explains why that is done. Still wondering. In place of that we get chapters on XML, unstructured data, and working with people. Useful information, but not a substitute for the above. The quality scorecard basically says a model should match requirements, completely, and follow org standards. Really, what about scalability and maintenance? Don't need a treatise and realize this was written for Business and IT, but one more chapter would have been great. I think an overview of those issues would be helpful to managers as well to understand when they receive push-back on initiatives as impractical. A minor gripe, the 1990s design, awkward full justification, and "inkjet quality" printing don't help but hinder readability. On the plus side---am now a lot better at reading modeling/UML diagrams and understanding the SQLAlchemy documentation better---real benefits. This book is decidedly mixed, I'd throw out every 5-star and 1-star reviews as carelessness, malice, or ballot stuffing.

The author provides a concise and easy to understand book on data modeling. The explanations are clear and the order in which is material is covered is good. I found the explanation for normalization in this book to be the best simple explanation I have heard yet. The material progresses from higher level modeling through logical modeling down to the physical model and why it differs from the logical. There are additional chapters help evaluate model thoroughness and quality. As someone looking for a refresher this book was not bad. This book would likely not be useful for an experienced modeler. The book holds true to the title and is Data Modeling Made Simple.

I like the author's use of imagery to describe data modeling (the camera analogy he uses throughout). It makes the process "come alive" in a very practical and useful way.

I'm coming from a "home-grown" Business Analyst perspective, or someone with a technical/front-end web development background, attempting to learn some basics in order to guide a cross-functional team through the effort of building a data warehouse. I found this book to be tremendously helpful. I love the style in which it is written, and how each chapter builds and re-iterates (in context) what has been previously mentioned. This is a very easy read and not overly presumptuous of technical knowledge. I highly recommend this book, and I was stretch to say this author in general... his approach to writing makes the concepts presented easy to learn.

Being new to Data Modeling, I was looking for a book which can give a holistic view in simple terms of what a Data Modeler does and the basics of data modeling. In that way, I can say, this book met the expectation more than what I had. I finished reading the book within a few days since the language and examples are easy to follow. Complex things have been explained in simple ways. I would recommend this book to anyone who is in the same boat as mine.

Amazing

bom

It provides the basic concept but does not help much it you want to know how to model one subject

For the most part, this book totally succeeds. It manages to stay relevant, fun and extremely accessible. The book is concise and follows two main examples through to illustrate the points made. 4 stars because on occasion Steve can't help but revert to techno-babble mode, although at least he has the realisation of this....I mean 'factless fact tables'?! The chapters from industry experts are varied. UML I found dull, whilst managing people I found to be an exceptional overview. Overall a great read for anyone interested in how data can be modelled.