SECTION A- APPLIED DATABASE THEORY
BTC AU is the second largest Bitcoin exchange company in Australia. While it focused on keeping up with its core business in a new and emerging environment BTC AU paid scant attention to managing the rest of its rapidly expanding business operations. Integration of its business processes with IT became one of the priorities of BTC AU.
The current approach to its backroom data handling management has been ad hoc and piecemeal. There was no overall map, plan, or model guided approach to the evolution of its systems. Records of past business performance have been hard to elicit from the traditional file processing systems leaving the company with an inability to gain insights to drive business planning forward.
The CIO of the company Sam Nakamoto wants to look at a database approach to integrating the various applications currently running within the organization with the hope of ultimately using the data to support decision making and developing new insights for management in order to gain competitive advantage.
As a business consultant to BTC AU, you are asked to develop a short brief to management, in the form of an essay (around 1000 words), highlighting the following
1. The existing and potential problems with the current data processing approach.
2. The need for a database approach to satisfy their organizational and decision making demands of the company.
3. A suggested database developmental approach
4. The primary activities associated with database design process.
You are required to extensively research on the relevant topics and present concise and workable solution.
There is no requirement for formal in-text referencing in this question. However, it is recommended you put a list of references at the end of the memo showing the published materials that you researched while answering this question.
SECTION B- SQL
For each question, marks will be awarded for the SQL and for the correct output.
The following E-R diagram represents a Car Hire database.
In this question, you will use the CAR HIRE database. The CAR HIRE database including appropriate data will be made available on the USQ Oracle server. You must use this data.
If you are using Oracle on your own computer and are unable to access the USQ server, email the course leader for a script file that will create the tables for you. Due to copyright issues, you will need to insert the data yourself but you will be provided with a template.
The table descriptions appear below, including the column names and data types.
Write SQL queries to solve the following specifications. Include the query AND THE OUTPUT. A screen dump of the output is acceptable. Show as many rows as you can.
A screen dump is usually done via the ALT + PRNT SCRN command sequence. While the output helps to understand your solution, you should not be analysing the output of the query in detail. As long as you are confident that your query corresponds to the question completely, your output may not be significant. You can have an output that says NO ROWS FOUND and it could be a perfectly valid output as long as your query fulfils the requirement.
1. Display structure of the i_model table. Display all the information stored in the i_model table belonging to car group ‘A4'.
2. Display the car registration, current mileage (miles_to_date column) and purchase date (date_bought column) for all cars. Order by current mileage in descending order.
3. Display all the cars registration, miles to date and status for all the cars that have not had a service but are available for hire. Order the list in ascending order of miles to date.
4. Display the booking number, date rent started, period of rental and the expected end date of each rental (i.e. date_rent_start + rental_period) and sort the output by the expected end date in descending order. Label the expected end date of each rental as:
‘EXPECTED END DATE'.
5. Display full details for all the bookings where the distance travelled during that booking (i.e. miles_in - miles_out) is less than 1000 miles.
6. Display rental period, booking number, name of the person who took the reservation, the date that the rental period starts and where Paid is set to ‘N' for all the bookings where the car has not been returned. List the result by the rental period for the booking in descending order.
7. Display full details for any car that: (a) costs more than $100,000.00 or the name of the car model starts with the letter ‘L' and (b) belongs to group ‘A4‘ and has a registration whose second digit is 9.
8. Display full details for all car groups belonging to ‘A1', ‘A2', ‘B1' or ‘B2' AND the rate per mile is either 110 or 120. Find a way of optimising your code so that the complete SQL statement has only ONE logical operator (AND, OR, NOT).
9. Display full details for all cars that have not been serviced before and have a current mileage of greater than 900.
10. Display full details for any car that: (a) costs less than $50,000.00 or the name of the car model starts with the letter ‘D' and (b) belongs to group ‘B2‘ and is currently available. (You should have a single query that completely fulfils all of the above conditions).
11. Display the name, town and usual payment method of all customers. Order by payment method ascending within town descending. Your query must NOT use the WHERE clause.
12. Display the booking number, registration and the name of the customer who made the booking. You may need to use traditional join between i_booking and i_customer tables to display all the required columns.
SECTION C- Data Modelling
PART MARKING: We will only mark TWO of the four questions below but you must submit answers to all four. We will choose the questions we mark randomly and mark the same questions for all submissions. Model answers will be supply for all questions during the semester.
Construct data models for the following specifications. Include an ERD and a list of relations (entity list). Your relations must show all attributes, primary keys and foreign keys. You must use the USQ (Finkelstein) methodology as described in your Study Book, the lectures
and the tutorials.
Question 1
A questionnaire is a research instrument consisting of a series of questions. We need to develop a model to store questionnaires and its underlying questions. A questionnaire records questionnaire name, primary contact name, start date and expected end date. A questionnaire
may have many questions. Each question has a question number, question text and a category description for the question.
Question 2
A mobile phone model consists of a number of variants (different styles, colours and features) which are sold as separate units. We need to develop a data model to record different mobile phone models and their variants. A mobile phone model records brand name, model name, model number (unique) and start year. A mobile phone model may have several variants. Each variant has a variant code, style, colour, feature, launch year and discontinued year.
Question 3
A Bitcoin wallet manages your Bitcoins. A wallet does not store Bitcoins but holds the private keys of the owner of the wallet that allow him/her to access his/her bitcoin addresses and to sign transactions to allow the owner to spend his/her funds.
Question 4
An event coordinator may be working on a number of events over time. An event can have multiple event coordinators working on it but will only have a single event manager. For an event coordinator, we store a unique coordinator identification, his/her office number and area of specialty. We also need to store the date the event coordinator commenced work on the event and the name of the event, the event manager's name and other relevant event details.
Prepare the following for all four questions-
1 An ER diagram: Show all entities, relationships, cardinalities and optionalities. Also, include all intersection entities but do not create entities that are not specifically covered by the specification. You must use the Finkelstein methodology as per the study book and tutorials.
2 A list of relations (entity list). Produce complete relations for all entities and attributes. Show all primary and foreign keys. Include all attributes that are specifically mentioned and all key attributes. You may need to create primary and foreign keys that are not specifically mentioned but do not create any other additional attributes.