>Skip Date. Read Patrick O'Brian instead. You'll learn about as much
>about practical data management.

Ahem. www.inconcept.com; You would find Terry Halpin's ORM
[Object Role Modelling] Methodology and basis of the InfoModeler
CASE tool, gobbled by Visio, Visio gobbled by Microsoft helpful in this
discussion.

The Journal of Conceptual Modeling has [and its free!] an excellent
series of articles showing the correspondence between ORM
and the UML.

Terry's book is quite good too and yes ORM guarantees a 4th or 5th
normal form design , which no ER tool can claim.

James Rumbaugh's [a physicist] OMT book [isbn 0-13-629841-9]
circa 1991 was good and one of the 5 authors Mike Blaha produced
a later one showing OMT applied to Database design.

However, Terry Halpin's modelling of constraints in ORM is bar none
the best that I've ever seen.

Now, back to my copy of William S. Cleveland's The Elements of Graphing
Data.

Sincerely,
Dr. Pangloss, Esq.

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