Database design question [was: free software alternative to Access]

[Richard Soule]

Paul,

You could try:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/customer-reviews/1558606726/ref=cm_cr_dp_2_1/103-8170352-9419859?%5Fencoding=UTF8&customer-reviews.sort%5Fby=-SubmissionDate&n=283155

Not sure about the above, but it seems highly rated (even though there 
are only 9 ratings).

All the books that I've liked over the years have been Oracle specific 
like this one:

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0072121203/qid=1113922379/sr=1-10/ref=sr_1_10/103-8170352-9419859?v=glance&s=books

WARNING!!! Discussion of software that costs money to use for business 
purposes follows!!!

At Oracle we've been working on a tool to 'replace access' (it's not 
really there yet, it's more powerful in many ways and less user friendly 
in some ways) for a number of years. I think I even showed a version of 
it years ago (8 years ago?) at UNH to the group once.  We now call the 
tool HTMLDB. It allows the development of applications with a web based 
front end against an Oracle database. It has some pretty nice features 
including the ability to copy a spreadsheet/access database into a form 
and have the tool automatically create tables (and lookup tables) for you.

I'm guessing that this is kind of similar to the PHP web admin tools 
that others were talking about before, but hopefully it is a bit more 
powerful.

HTMLDB on OTN:
http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/database/htmldb/index.html

Viewlet (flash) of HTMLDB in action:
http://otn.oracle.com/products/database/htmldb/viewlets/htmldb_quicktour_viewlet.html

As always you can download all Oracle software from 
http://otn.oralce.com for personal use without sending Oracle any money. 
(Here is the 'big daddy' of database design tools: 
http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/designer/index.html)

We've also come up with a very low price point for Oracle Standard 
Edition One: $750 for 5 users (5 user minimum, each additional user 
would be $150) or $5,000/cpu for unlimited users with a limit of 2 cpus 
to compete with other companies that offer low cost 'databases'. And of 
course databases from Oracle really are ANSI SQL compliant. :)

Rich

Paul Lussier wrote:

>All this talk about databases reminded me of a project I was working
>on a while back in which I had some fundamental database design
>questions, but not the time to properly research the answers. (of
>course, like all great projects driven by marketing, the immediate
>crisis which prompted the project was quickly solved by "changing
>direction" and subsequently resulted in them forgetting I was even
>doing anything to help them :(
>
>At any rate, I found myself trying to set up several tables for a
>database, but realized, that in general, other than gluing the tables
>together with basic SQL queries wrapped up in a spiffy perl CGI, I
>know next to nothing about "proper database design". 
>
>So, does anyone have any decent references or pointers to basic
>relational database design?  I'm looking for something generic to SQL,
>and not tied to any specific implementation.
>
>Thanks.
>  
>