Conceptual Data Modeling and Database Design ─ A Fully Algorithmic Approach: The Shortest Advisable Path

This new book aims to provide both beginners and experts with a completely algorithmic approach to data analysis and conceptual modeling, database design, implementation, and tuning, starting from vague and incomplete customer requests and ending with IBM DB/2, Oracle, MySQL, MS SQL Server, or Access based software applications. A rich panoply of solutions to actual useful data sub-universes (e.g. business, university, public and home library, geography, history, etc.) is provided, constituting a powerful library of examples.

Four data models are presented and used: the graphical Entity-Relationship, the mathematical EMDM, the physical Relational, and the logical deterministic deductive Datalog ones. For each one of them, best practice rules, algorithms, and the theory beneath are clearly separated. Four case studies, from a simple public library example, to a complex geographical study are fully presented, on all needed levels.

Several dozens of real-life exercises are proposed, out of which at least one per chapter is completely solved. Both major historical and up-to-date references are provided for each of the four data models considered.

The book provides a library of useful solutions to real-life problems and provides valuable knowledge on data analysis and modeling, database design, implementation, and fine tuning.

Christian Mancas, PhD, is currently an associate professor with both the Mathematics and Computer Science Departments of Ovidius University, Constanta, Romania, and the Engineering Taught in Foreign Languages Department (Computer Science and Telecommunications in English stream) of Politehnica University, Bucharest, Romania (as an invited professor). Since 2012, he is also a database architect with Asentinel International srl, Bucharest, a subsidiary of Asentinel LLC, Memphis, Tennessee. His specialties include university teaching, R&D, business analysis, conceptual data and knowledge modeling and querying, client-server, hierarchical software architecture, object-oriented, event-driven design, structured development, complex project and small IT company management, Datalog, SQL, C#, XML programming, etc.

Professor Christian Mancas has published dozens of scientific papers (in Romania, USA, Austria, and Greece), which have been indexed by ACM Digital Library, Zentralblatt, Scopus, DBLP, Arnetminer, Researchr, TDGS, SCEAS, etc. He has also published three books in Romanian and dozens of reviews (mostly in USA, including ACM Reviews). He was a program committee member and session chairman for several software conferences in USA, Austria, and Romania, and he is a member of several associations (including ACM, the Romanian Mathematics Sciences Society, and the International Who’s Who of Professionals). Since 2006, his biography is included in MarquisWho’s Who in the World and Who’s Who in Science and Engineering and Hubners’Who’s Who in Romania.

Since 1990, he also worked for several IT startups, including his own DATASIS Consult srl (co-owned with his good friend and faculty colleague Ion Draghicescu) and DATASIS ProSoft srl (who had 25 programmers working for the design and development of several ERP-type database applications for customers from France, UK, Switzerland, USA, Israel, Greece, and Romania).

His main research areas are conceptual data and knowledge modeling and querying; database design, implementation, and optimization; as well as the architecture, design, development, fine-tuning, and maintenance of data and knowledge base management systems.

Dr. Mancas graduated in 1977 from the Computers Department of Politehnica University of Bucharest, Romania, with a thesis on Generating Parsers for LR(k) Grammars, under the supervision of Professor Dan Luca Serbanati. Up until the fall of communism in 1990, he worked as a software engineer and, since 1980, R&D manager of a state-owned Computer Center in Bucharest (contributing to the design, development, and maintenance of a dedicated ERP), also conducting (from time to time) computer programming labs at Politehnica University of Bucharest, but for political reasons, he was not accepted for PhD studies. He started this program under the supervision of Professor Cristian Giumale in 1992 and obtained his PhD in 1997 from the above department, with a thesis on Conceptual Data and Knowledge Modeling.