Sure, I guess by first step I was referring to the first thing when I sit down to start coding. There's all the stuff that comes before actually doing that, ge

Sure, I guess by first step I was referring to the first thing when I sit down to start coding. There's all the stuff that comes before actually doing that, generally, though not always, the feature is driven by some front-end requirement and may have accompanying product specification and possibly even UX designs. But I try to take those and think about what the domain concept being addressed is, rather than the shape of the data the front-end requires. Almost always the front-end and requirements will change through iteration so I find that purely mapping the FE concepts directly to the data-structure is less robust than taking a step back and thinking about the actual data without consideration for the proposed front-end design. Though the front-end can still inform aspects of the database at this stage it should only provide minor optimizations to the schema through indexes or normalization choices. I suppose in part it's taking a domain-driven design approach and making the first step encoding the domain in the database. It has been my experience that many headaches in applications I encounter could have been avoided if the constraints had been enforced against the data at the persistence level rather than assuming the application level code will handle it correctly.