Project managers/Team Leaders/Leads...: if you're about to start an Oracle Designer project, get yourself a copy (and everyone on your team one) of this book. The authors have done an outstanding job in covering most if not all standards and naming conventions for Designer objects. And boy, do we have objects in Designer. May be the best part of about this book is that you (the leader) won't have to spend months and months of fighting and trying to come up with standards that everyone can agree upon. It simply IS there- take it and use it. End of discussions. Kudos to Mark and Ken.

If your organization is just getting started with Designer, you need this book. It provides really valuable guidance based on intimate knowledge of how the tool works. If you use the standards they suggest your life will be much easier! In my work at a large metropolitan Transit agency I am trying to get almost 40 people to standardize on Designer. I just hand them the book and say "Do it this way." The end result is the naming conventions match, the different projects synch up and everyone can concentrate on being productive.

I had just finished a short Oracle Designer Naming standards for our Database and Data Architecture group, when I bought this book. It is clear, concise, helpful, and for me, incredibly timely! The Naming standard I created was a pretty bare bones document, created to help our Logical Modelers as well as our DBAs. I incorporated this short Naming standard into the MS Word template (provided on the invaluable CD included with the book), to live on our intranet site. I was able to create this new well formatted, larger, and more thorough document, in less than a week. It saved me at least a month of work, partially by accepting some of the standards that the authors propose, and then seeking editorial reviews from in-house topic experts (rather than the more traditional method of seeking input, writing the standard, then sending it out for review). Of course, I only used the sections that were appropriate for our company.

I actually read the book (as in sit down and read, not just browse), and found the style very readable and the content consistently on target. If you need to write an Oracle Designer Standard, it would be most inefficient and foolish not to start with this book.