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Relational
Database
Consulting & Training
Our focus at OpenLine
Consulting is on helping you ensure that your relational database
applications can be developed quickly, yet still are maintainable,
robust, and secure. In addition to consulting, we provide advanced
training (primarily Oracle-specific) in the following areas, which
can be customized to suit your needs:
We aso provide a variety of educational materials,
including many available under a Creative Commons license
OpenLine Consulting provides
training and consulting in the Boston area. The principal of OpenLine
Consulting, Dr. Ellis Cohen, teaches introductory and advanced courses
in Database Management at Boston University's Metropolitan College
for undergraduate and master's degree students. He has developed
a number of pioneering notations and methodologies for database
application design, including Crow Magnum™, and is currently
writing a textbook on the Theory, Practice & Methodology of
Relational Database Design and Programming. He has a Ph.D. in Computer
Science from Carnegie-Mellon University.
Training Topics
- Conceptual Modeling,
Relational Mapping & Database Re-Engineering: Databases
are often designed and documented only at the relational level
(using tables and other objects directly suported by the database),
which can lead to sub-optimal, hard-to-maintain systems. You'll learn
how to become an expert at using Extended ER (entity-relationship)
models, which communicate essential design details more clearly,
and which facilitate exploration of alternative designs. You will
also learn how to evaluate and choose among the myriad ways of
mapping ER models to relational or object-relational models (i.e.
which objects and tables are used and how they reference one another).
Finally, you will learn how to reverse-engineer ER designs from
existing databases. ER models will be constructed using both UML
and Crow Magnum™, an extension of the industry-standard
Crow's Foot model meant for agile collaborative design.
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Agile
Database Application Design: You will learn how to rapidly
produce or re-engineer effective maintainable application designs
for database-backed applications based on
- Role-Based
Operation Modeling, a simplified form of UML's Use Case Modeling,
- Business
Rule Analysis, a technique for unambiguously documenting business
rules as access constraints and integrity constraints
(divided into state constraints and transition constraints)
- Business
Rule Mapping, a set of techniques for determining how to best
implement business rules, addressing both maintainabiliity
and performance.
- Enforcing Complex
Integrity Constraints: Complex integrity constraints
can be implemented by rejecting improper operations, or attempting
to correct them - using triggers, or using application code with
either continuous or intermittent checking. You will learn about
the details and tradeoffs of alternate implementations for state
and transition constraints, the impact of transactions, and show
how to deal with cascading corrections, where correction of one
integrity constraint violates another. You will understand the
power of using manifest views™ to make the code
for managing integrity constraints both maintainable and easily
testable. Finally, you will learn how to make changes in the relational
design (which tables are used and how they reference one another)
to replace complex constraints with ones that are easier to maintain.
- Implementing Access
Control: Many database applications implement access
control in the middle-tier. You will learn how to do that effectively,
using code that is maintainable and reusable, even when high performance
is required. You will also learn how to move code into the data-tier,
and use database mechanisms including triggers, privileges, views,
roles and security policies to produce applications that are signficantly
more secure.
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