books on designing database architecture? [closed]

Question

I was wondering if anybody had any recommendations for some good free resources where I could learn about designing complex database architecture?

Any books which shares knowledge regarding scalability,fault-tolerance,which DBMS to choose,availability and all essential factors.

All suggestions appreciated.

Answer 1

I have some info for you, but some of it's not quite what you asked for. So...

Part 1

I was (I'm guessing) in a similar position to you a while back; while reading up info on database design and data warehousing is definitely useful the best source of wisdom comes from other people who have been doing it for a long time.

• Don't just look at database design (in terms of a single database) - find a good data architect (if you can, they are rare); when you do, pick his/her brain. The mark of a good database isn't just what indexes it has (etc), I've discovered it's also about how the database fits into the wider picture.
• The 'development' view: find a good developer to get and pick their brain too; You're after someone older - the more grey hairs they have the better.
• The 'DBA' view: DBAs will offer a very different (and valuable) viewpoint, and it's usually not too hard to find a good one who's quite happy to complain about all the crap databases developers produce :)

Part 2 - Useful Links

As far as articles go I've gotten a lot of mileage out of Wikipedia - Wikipedia doesn't have an article called "How to Ace Database Design" but it does have good articles on a lot of the parts / mechanics of databases, data marts and data warehouses; my recommended reading list would include:

• Data Warehouse
• Data Mart
• OLTP and OLAP (designing for a transactional system is very different from designing for reporting).
• Fact and Dimension (and Slowly Changing Dimension)
• Star Schema and Snowflake Schema
• Normalization and Denormalization