To become a good database designer, you need to extend your skills to larger problems. To motivate you about the importance of extending your skills, this chapter describes the nature of large database development projects. This chapter then presents a methodology for view design with an emphasis on constructing an ERD to represent a data entry form. Forms can provide important sources of requirements for database design. You will learn to analyze individual forms, construct an ERD, and check the ERD for consistency against the form. Because of the emphasis on views and forms, this chapter logically follows Chapter 10 on application development with views. While studying this chapter, you may want to review important concepts from Chapter 10, such as updatable views.
After the presentation of view design, this chapter describes the process of view integration, combining ERDs representing individual views. You will learn about the incremental and parallel integration approaches, determination of an integration strategy by analyzing relationships among forms, and application of the integration process using both the incremental and parallel approaches.