Database Design

Ludden first used computers in 1960 when the chemistry department at Pomona College received a Clary DE-60 (valued at $20,000) and the homework doubled in Physical Chemistry - required for graduation.

In 1973 Ludden took a brief contract at the Harvard/MIT computing center doing statistics for a graduate student of Turkish voting behavior, using SPSS. Analyzing backcountry hiking permits in five National Parks paid his way through graduate school at University of Washington 1975-77 and also taught him FORTRAN.

Since the mid 1980s Ludden has designed databases. Most have been for administrative applications, for a number of clients in the Puget Sound area, including Weyerhaeuser, Microsoft, Washington Mutual Bank, Group Health Cooperative, Premera Insurance, Nordstrom, and Boeing.

Ludden initially used ERwin as a design tool, but early in the 1990s he realized that Entity-Relational (E-R) design entailed a lot of mystery. About this time he learned of Object Role Modeling (ORM) and the work of Terry Halpin. This method guarantees a normalized model and includes more business constraints than E-R modeling.

One of the bigger projects was the Vehicle Inventory system at Auto Warehousing, used to manage hundreds of thousands of new cars at dozens of locations.

Some of his models are shown in the files on the right.