The seventh edition makes substantial revisions to the sixth edition while preserving the proven pedagogy developed in the first sixth editions. Experience gained from instruction of university students and online learners along with feedback from adopters of the earlier editions has led to the development of new material and refinements to existing material. A five-course specialization developed for the Coursera platform in 2016 provided the impetus for substantial new material in the seventh edition about data warehouses.

The most significant changes in the seventh edition are a substantial expansion of data warehouse material and new  coverage of NoSQL database technology and features. Many organizations focus on business intelligence to gain competitive advantage, manage risks, and connect with customers. Data warehouse technology and practices provide a foundation for business intelligence in many organizations.

The seventh edition expands, updates, and reorganizes data warehouse material from two to four chapters. The seventh edition contains substantial new material about management of data warehouse development, data warehouses in major industries, the schema integration process, a mini case study about data warehouse design, SQL statements for data integration, data integration tools, SQL extensions for analytic queries, the Microsoft Multidimensional Expressions language, pivot table tools, and a business strategy game for managing development of data warehouses. Besides new material, the seventh edition substantially updates existing material in the sixth edition such as indicating the market decline of data warehouse appliances.

Organizations continue to face challenging demands from big data applications involving batch processing of large volumes of semi-structured data and online processing of intense levels of transactions. NoSQL database technology provides a foundation to deal with these big data applications in a growing number of organizations.

The seventh edition contains substantial new material on NoSQL database technology about column-oriented storage, big data parallel processing architectures, and in-memory transaction processing. Both NoSQL DBMSs and enterprise relational DBMSs support these technologies. To understand explosive growth in NoSQL database DBMSs, the seventh edition  provides an overview about features and data models in NoSQL DBMSs as well as detailed coverage of the JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) and the N1QL query language in Couchbase Server, a leading NoSQL DBMS.

Besides the expanded coverage of data warehouses and NoSQL database technology, the seventh edition provides numerous refinements to existing material based on classroom experience. Chapters 4 to 11 contain new examples in response to difficulties students had with textbook gaps. The seventh edition makes substantial revisions to coverage of data modeling tools, query formulation guidelines, normalization processes, and trigger coding guidelines. In addition, refinements and updates to most chapters have improved the presentation and currency of the material.

For database application development, the seventh edition covers SQL:2016, an evolutionary change from previous SQL standard versions (SQL:1999 to SQL:2011). The seventh edition explains the scope of SQL:2016, the difficulty of conformance with the standard, and new elements of the standard. Numerous refinements of details about database application development extend the proven coverage of the first sixth editions: query formulation guidelines, query formulation errors, count method for division problems, query formulation steps for hierarchal forms and reports, common errors in queries for forms, trigger formulation guidelines, and transaction design guidelines.

For database administration and processing environments, the seventh edition provides expanded coverage of NoSQL technology. The most significant new topics are columnstore indexes, in-memory transaction processing, and parallel processing architectures for big data applications.

In addition to new material and refinements to existing material, the seventh edition extends chapter supplements. The seventh edition contains new end-of-chapter questions and problems in most chapters. New material in the textbook’s website includes detailed tutorials about Microsoft Access 2016, Visio Professional 2010, and Aqua Data Studio, assignments for first and second database courses, and sample exams.

The software tutorials for Microsoft Access, Visio Professional, and Aqua Data Studio support concepts presented in textbook chapters 4, 5, 6, 9, and 10. To make room for new material, the seventh edition eliminates two chapters from the sixth edition. The seventh edition contains two chapters of new material about data warehouses. New material about NoSQL technology replaces outdated material about object-oriented databases. To remove bloat, the seventh edition eliminates chapters covering a form-based approach for database design and a case study about database design. The course website contains these chapters for continuity with the sixth edition.