The book is built around a fictitious case study of the development of EAB Health Care's new automated on-line medical record system. This enables the authors to work through various design scenarios as the teams involved gain more understanding of their customer's requirements and the various ways in which these can be implemented between the software and database designs.
The first half of the book is the actual analysis, design and implementation of the featured system. It's pitched at high-level technical managers. The latter half contains two appendices: the UML diagrams from the Business Use Case Models and the User Case Descriptions.
Despite emphasising that systems are about practical ways to improve some aspect of a business UML For Database Design points towards increased efficiency using UML as the common language to integrate system analysis, design and implementation. The use of real world problems and examples in the fictitious system development is a little disingenuous, and while the authors make their case for using UML to model all facets of complex systems--especially those with a regulatory requirement--it may not be enough to win over database managers defending their turf. --Steve Patient