I am trying to blog all of the chapters of the book, but due to deadlines and a lot of shuffling about, I never got around it for these three chapters, two of which I have added since I wrote the original table of contents. All of these contain mostly material from previous editions of the book, updated a good amount, but nothing tremendously different if you had memorized the material from the previous edition. As such, the pre-writing blog ritual wasn’t as necessary (for me at least) as it is going to become in the next few chapters after these.

Part of the material was stuff I had previous intended to cut. I got to the end of Chapter 1 and started to feel that I hadn’t done nearly enough on requirements, so I resurrected 1/2 of the last edition’s chapter 3 on conceptual modeling. 

Chapter 2 is now a short, fifteen or so page chapter about how necessary requirements are and some tips on finding them.

Chapter 3 is a data modeling overview using IDEF1X, and really hasn’t changed too much other than fixing some mistakes from the previous edition, particularly in the description of Information Engineering/Crow’s Feet modeling’s graphical elements. Of course I still have a open question mark for the Denali parts of this chapter… who knows what is in store?

Chapter 4 is the rest of the Conceptual Modeling chapter from previous editions. When I started to jump from modeling to the Normalization chapter, it felt really just too harsh, plus I am having second thoughts about how I plan to present modeling and implementation.  I am thinking about presenting sub-models to demonstrate all of the different patterns you can model along with how to implement them in a single package. I really am struggling to find a way to write this stuff in a manner kind of like I use when I teach a day long course, which I think goes along with how people learn.

I still have a good amount of work to do before I get there, and first off I have some work to do on the Normalization chapter to get make it more concise and clear, based on some reader feedback (my favorite part of the writing process is getting constructive criticism, so email me at drsql@hotmail.com if you have any, or leave comments.)