Database Modeling for Software Engineers: A Practical Guide to Designing Reliable, Scalable, and High-Performance Databases Modern Applications

Every scalability crisis, every 3 a.m. outage, every "we need to rewrite this from scratch" conversation usually traces back to the same root cause: a database that was never actually modeled - just built, one table at a time, until it looked like it worked.Database Modeling for Software Engineers is a practical, PostgreSQL 18-based guide to designing databases that hold up in production, not just in a demo. Instead of treating modeling as an ER-diagram exercise or a checklist of normal forms, it walks through the process real engineering teams use: turning business requirements into entities and relationships, translating those into tables, keys, and constraints, shaping the schema around the queries your application actually runs, and testing every decision against real data before it ever reaches users.Inside, you'll learn how to: - Turn a vague requirement like "customers should be able to place orders" into the entities, relationships, and constraints hiding inside it- Design indexes and read execution plans so performance decisions come from evidence, not guesswork- Handle transactions, concurrency, and deadlocks so simultaneous updates don't quietly corrupt your data- Model what most books skip entirely - JSON columns, historical and temporal data, hierarchical structures, multi-tenant systems, and AI-enabled applications- Evolve a schema safely in production with versioning and zero-downtime migrations, instead of taking the app offline to change a column- Apply the entire workflow in a full capstone project that takes a real application from raw requirements to a secured, optimized, production-ready databaseMost database books stop at diagrams and normal forms, or turn into pure SQL reference material. This one treats modeling as one continuous process - requirements → entities → schema → queries → indexes → transactions → production - built around a single real PostgreSQL 18 codebase from the first chapter to the last, including the parts of modern applications most guides leave out.If you've ever inherited a schema you didn't trust, or watched an application slow to a crawl as it grew, this book gives you the process to make sure your next one doesn't end up the same way.Scroll up and grab your copy today.