Students will select a situation or problem from their company as a course project that can be solved using a database system. Using MS Access, or MS SQL Server Express, students will create a relational database model of the system.
The project should be divided into manageable stages. All Project steps should be submitted together through the "Course Project" Assignment in Black Board (Do not e-mail the instructor with any of your deliverables).
The Project can be conducted by an individual or a team. A team may have a maximum of three students.
Step 1 - Project Proposal
Step 2 - Entities and Relational Model
Step 3 - Design and implementation
Step 1:
The project proposal should include a general background of the business, a description of the problem associated with the database project, and a description of any industry or company- specific terminology used within the project. The users and clients of the database system should be identified.
The overall purpose and benefits of the resulting database system should be identified. The project stages and plan are considered part of the proposal.
The deliverable from Step 1 is a 2-page document describing the project plus samples of any source documents. A one-page catalog of the source documents may be appropriate as well.
Step 2:
At this time, the scope of the project should be analyzed, and the E-R diagram should fit on a single piece of paper. If the E-R diagram cannot be confined to a single piece of paper, the scope of the project needs to be narrowed and the goals of Step 1 need to be re-assessed.
The student should normalize the data into 3NF, and then, using SQL, create the tables, define the relationships between the tables and populate the fields by entering in sample data.
The deliverable from Step 2 is the one-page E-R diagram and another page containing a snapshot of the normalized tables. You can use any drawing tools, such as the ones provided by MS Word or Excel to draw your diagrams.
Step 3:
You should provide an implementation of this data model into schema and show those schema tables loaded with sample data in the form of a database.
The deliverable from step 3 is the actual database you have created.
When managers analyze their environment or develop plans they encounter unknowns. When unknowns are encountered one has two choices:
1) Make a good guess by estimating reasonable values of the unknowns
2) Find out
Real world managers do occasionally have to guess. Guessing is not all bad -- it represents the operation of sophisticated heuristic algorithms on an enormously complicated neural network architecture computer (your Brain!). But, unless this neural network is TRAINED (we call this experience), the guess may not be a good one.
If your experience is not comprehensive enough, the other approach, finding out, may be needed. In this class, you are strongly encouraged to employ the second approach and find out!