Database Design

Database design sets the long-term maintainability, performance, and correctness of a data-driven application. Early schema decisions are expensive to reverse. Every table, column, index, and constraint should exist for a reason backed by access patterns and business rules.

Data modeling principles

Start from access patterns

Design tables around how the application reads and writes data, not around how entities look in a domain model. Two questions drive every schema decision:

1. What queries will run most frequently? These determine table structure, indexes, and denormalization choices.
2. What consistency guarantees does the data need? These determine normalization level, constraints, and transaction boundaries.

Entity relationships