Aspiring Dev Ditches JSON Laziness for Proper Database Design: Normalization Saves Hospital Appointments from Duplicate Address Hell

A beginner's guide to database design for developers has been published, highlighting the importance of data modeling in creating efficient and scalable databases. The process involves capturing requirements, building a conceptual model, designing a logical model, and creating a physical model. This iterative process requires constant adjustments and feedback from users to ensure the system meets their needs. The guide uses a hospital system as an example, demonstrating how to identify entities, attributes, and relationships between them. Normalization, a crucial step in database design, involves removing duplicated data to improve data quality and maintainability. The guide also discusses the use of supertypes and subtypes to avoid data inconsistencies. Unlike storing data in JSON documents, relational design may take longer upfront but produces systems that are easier to query, maintain, and scale. As the demand for efficient data management continues to grow, understanding database design principles becomes increasingly important for developers in the tech industry.