Whether building a relational, object-relational, or object-oriented database, database developers are increasingly relying on an object-oriented design approach as the best way to meet user needs and performance criteria. This book teaches you how to use the Unified Modeling Language-the official standard of the Object Management Group-to develop and implement the best possible design for your database. Inside, the author leads you step by step through the design process, from requirements analysis to schema generation. You'll learn to express stakeholder needs in UML use cases and actor diagrams, to translate UML entities into database components, and to transform the resulting design into relational, object-relational, and object-oriented schemas for all major DBMS products.