Database Design and Relational Theory Quotes

“What design theory does is state in a precise way what certain aspects of
common sense consist of. In my opinion, that’s the real achievement—or one of the real achievements, anyway—of
the theory: It formalizes certain commonsense principles, thereby opening the door to the possibility of
mechanizing those principles (that is, incorporating them into computerized design tools). Critics of the theory often
miss this point; they claim, quite rightly, that the ideas are mostly just common sense, but they don’t seem to realize
it’s a significant achievement to state what common sense means in a precise and formal way.”
― C.J. Date, Database Design and Relational Theory: Normal Forms and All That Jazz

“The overall objective of logical design is to achieve a design that’s (a) hardware independent, for obvious
reasons; (b) operating system and DBMS independent, again for obvious reasons; and finally, and perhaps a little
controversially, (c) application independent (in other words, we’re concerned primarily with what the data is, rather
than with how it’s going to be used). Application independence in this sense is desirable for the very good reason
that it’s normally—perhaps always—the case that not all uses to which the data will be put are known at design
time; thus, we want a design that’ll be robust, in the sense that it won’t be invalidated by the advent of application
requirements that weren’t foreseen at the time of the original design.”
― C.J. Date, Database Design and Relational Theory: Normal Forms and All That Jazz