The principles of database design, or, the Truth is out there

The principles of database design, or, the Truth is out there May 17, 2025 by Eduardo Bellani Every software project needs to represent the reality of the business he is embedded in. The way we can represent reality as limited rational beings is through propositions, i.e, declarative statements that affirm or deny something about reality. When a collection of such propositions is stored in a computer system, we call it a database. Such database needs to be designed to properly reflect reality. This can’t be automated, since the semantics of the situation need to be encoded in a way that can be processed by a computer. Such then is the goal of database design: to encode propositions in such a way that can properly be processed by a database management system (DBMS). At this point, a regular software developer comes to a stall. Since there is scarcely any formal training in database design (or formal logic) in his education, he tends to fall back haphazardly on ad-hoc methods, with se ... Read full article.