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Data Modeling Essentials, Third Edition Review by Michael Tozer
Truly a Mixed Bag of Goods!
There is a great deal of excellent material contained within the corpus of this text. But to be fair, much of the material is also far less than first rate. In particular, the first and last chapters were excellent. These provided, respectively, an overview of the discipline, with some philosophical underpinnings, and a very excellent, sensible, and readable review of Enterprise Data Modeling strategy. On the other side of the ledger, the chapter on subtypes was very weak, as were several others.
One supposes that such a mixed bag of goods results from two writers attempting together to produce a common message. In this case, that attempt fails. And what we see instead are two markedly different forms of outreach and instruction. I didn't care to discover which author wrote which section. But the results were obvious. It is up, in my view, to the authors and the editors to sort this out in hopes of producing a better quality result in the future.
We would recommend the book, in a qualified sense, to the practictioner. The excellence does outweigh, and prevail over, the mediocrity, even though it is, at times, a "close run thing", as someone famously said. And we would hope also that the authors and editors would take these candid comments to heart. God bless.