Designing database from scratch

[Peter Corlett]

On 25 Oct 2006, at 11:05, alex at owal.co.uk wrote:
[...]
> What is the "state of the art" for database design in the open source
> world? What do you use?

For the initial design? I take a pencil and a big bit of paper and  
write the basic concepts down. I then draw lines between them to  
indicate how they relate to each other. A rubber might be required in  
the process, and perhaps some more paper.

This will usually then get turned into a machine-readable form,  
typically a text file of SQL statements with a reasonable amount of  
documentation as to the whys rather than the whats.

(Note to my predecessors: an already-running database instance is not  
sufficient documentation on its own.)