The database is the core of any company. All the report that the company trades with is saved in form of database. A thoughtfully designed database makes it easier to retrieve relevant information quickly.
Additionally, a well-designed database makes it easier for future database administrators to manage it without having to spend hours figuring out what is what.
Although it seems like organizations should spend enough time in planning and get everything right, there are some very common database design mistakes that are made in a rush to get everything implemented quickly due to time constraints.
Insufficient planning and design: As mentioned above, since databases are the crux of any project, DBA's should spend enough time mapping the needs of the database not only for current requirements but anticipate future needs. Else the team will spend a lot of future time coming up with hot fixes for future needs.
• Normalization: Normalization refers to defining relationships of how the data interacts with each other. For e.g.: Shared data should be part of the same table. Improper normalization results in data not being stored properly which gets very confusing when retrieved.
• Poor naming standards: This is one of the most common mistakes that the developers make while designing a database. Naming standards are most often a personal choice that is made by the designers.
The names chosen should be standardized and normalized so that it makes the most sense for future administrators/ programmers to figure out without having to spend hours going through the documentation.
One of the articles that I read about on poor naming convention being used was in Boston public schools (Zwicker, A. (n.d.)). The school's database table had used "year" in the primary school table name.
The understanding at that time was that a new database would be created in the subsequent year which will not have an embedded year in it.