Agile Database Techniques: Effective Strategies for the Agile Software Developer [Paperback]

If you are also looking for depth of coverage of the above topics, you will have to look elsewhere, perhaps after reading this book to get a very high-level treatment of the topics. I found myself thinking, "This is great. I agree with this advice. Now what do I do?"

The book doesn't come down to a low enough level to really put you on solid ground, but if what you want is wide coverage of all of the elements that go into developing database-based applications, this is a well-written book to begin with.

The first part of the book, "Foundational Skills and Knowledge", covers the challenges and how to meet them with eight excellent chapters that truly give the foundational knowledge. The next part, "Evolutionary Database Development", is comprised of seven chapters that introduce Agile techniques as they relate to DB development. Among the two strongest chapters in this part of the book are the ones covering DB refactoring and mapping objects to relational databases. This material, to me, clarified a lot of issues I had before reading this book. Part 3 is more focused on development techniques, with excellent information about concurrency control, access controls and related topics. The final part of the book is specific to general Agile implementation. You need not embrace Agile methods to learn an enormous amount from this book.

If you want to know more about this book's contents you will find a great deal of information on the author's Agile Data web site (paste the ASIN, B0000A3527, into the search box at the top of this page, select All Products and click GO). I also recommend Clifton Nock's "Data Access Patterns: Database Interactions in Object-Oriented Applications" (ISBN 0131401572), which augments this book in many respects.

Should you buy this book? Well, try answering the following questions:

- Could you easily create a physical data model of your schema?
- Can you explain the difference between first and third normal form?
- What about first and third object normalization forms?
- Can you list the challenges in mapping an object model to a data model?

Did you answer honestly? Because these are just some of the items covered in Part One of the book and unless you said yes to all of the above, you will walk away with plenty of ideas for improving your development after a single reading. This is the core reason I would recommend this book. It is full of ideas that you might never have thought to include in your development practices, and probably some that you had thought about but were not sure what the best approach might be.

My complaint with "Agile Database Techniques" is that it could use another iteration. In the introduction, the author states "When I first started writing this book, I intended its focus to be on the agile data method... Because I was taking an iterative and incremental approach to the development of the book, I quickly realized that the real value lay in detailed development techniques instead of yet another methodology." While I can agree with and embrace the merits of applying agility to my development practices, I think there is an overabundance of methodology content in the book that only clouds its real value.

In summary, I think this is one of those books that will sit on my shelf for some time to come as a great reference for how to approach any number of application and database development related items.