Review of "Management Data Bases, by R. Clay Sprowls"; Wiley/Hamilton, 1976

This text is heavily oriented toward having readers design and implement a data base for a defined business activity, such as sales. Chapters One, "The Developing Data Base Environment," Five, "Logical Structures or Why Data Bases," and Eight, "Some Design Guidelines," contain excellent material for motivating the reader to think about the data base approach in a context of supplying informa- tion to business managers. The latter part of Chapter Five contains the initial definition of the purchase order example which is used throughout the text. Chapter Eight exposes the student to the reasoning which supports the author's solution to the purchase order design problem. A normalizing procedure is used as an integral part of the design process.