Recently I've studied about object oriented analysis and design and I liked a lot about it. In every place I've read people say that the idea is to start with the minimum set of requirements and go improving along the way, revisiting this each iteration and making it better as we contiuously develop and contact the customer interested in the software. In particular, one course from Lynda.com said a lot of that: we don't want to spend a lot of time planing everything upfront, we just want to have the minimum to get started and then improve this each iteration.

Now, I've also seem a course from the same guy about database design, and there he says differently. He says that although when working with object orientation he likes the agile iterative approach, for database design we should really spend a lot of time planing things upfront instead of just going along the way with the minimum.

But this confuses me a little. Indeed, the database will persist important data from our domain model and perhaps configurations of the software and so on. Now, if I'm going to continuously revist the analysis and design of the model, it seems the database design should change also. In the same way, if we plan all the database upfront it seems we are also planing all the model upfront, so the two ideas seems to be incompatible.

I really like agile iterative approach, but I'm also looking at getting better design for the database also, so when working with agile iterative approach, how should we deal with the database design?