New Book Review: "The Data Model Resource Book Volume 3"
New book review for The Data Model Resource Book Volume 3: Universal Patterns for Data Modeling, by Len Silverston and Paul Agnew, Wiley Publishing Inc, 2009:
Incredibly well done follow-up to the first two volumes of Silverston's data model series (see my reviews for "The Data Model Resource Book Volume 1 (Revised Edition): A Library of Universal Data Models for All Enterprises" and "The Data Model Resource Book Volume 2 (Revised Edition): A Library of Universal Data Models by Industry Types"). As discussed in the introduction to this book, while the first volume answered the question "Where can we find a book showing a standard way to model common data model structures?" and the second volume extended the template models presented in the first volume by adding additional data model constructs that are industry specific, this third volume answers the question "How can we quickly extend and customize these models for our organization and our needs to quickly develop any data model with higher quality, even if it is specific to our enterprise?"
The patterns that Silverston and Agnew present are categorized into chapters entitled "Setting Up Roles: What Parties Do", "Using Roles: How Parties Are Involved", "Hierarchies, Aggregations, and Peer-to-Peer Relationships: The Organization of Similar Data", "Types and Categories: The Classification of Data", "Status: The States of Data", "Contact Mechanisms: How to Get in Touch", and "Business Rules: How Things Should Work". Each chapter is well laid out, similar in style to other books of this genre such as "Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software" by Erich Gamma, Richard Helm, Ralph Johnson, and John Vlissides. In this text, each pattern is laid out in its own section that answers the following questions: "Why Do We Need This Pattern?", "How Does This Pattern Work?", "When Should This Pattern Be Used?", and "What Are the Weaknesses of the Pattern?"