Access to accurate and timely information is key to proper decision making in a business! This units assignment is to develop the main database for your assigned business. This will be done in steps, as noted below. Document each step and turn in the resulting documentation to show EACH STEP and the progression of the database development. Do not combine or skip any steps, provide details for every step!

Step One:

Databases must be planned in the same way that a plan is required to build a house. Every table and piece of data must be considered and placed properly before the database can be implemented in a database management system. The most common type of database used in a business is a relational database, such as Oracle or Microsoft Access. This exercise is based on a relational database model, made up of tables (also called relations) that are common to a business. However, before beginning the database development, its important to identify the purpose of the database. For this step, develop a statement clearly indicating the purpose of the database. In other words, what are you trying to accomplish by storing this data? Then identify at least five different reports that could be pulled from the database for the purpose of decision making; for each report, also explain how it will be used . As an example, if the business is Chadron State College, one report might be a listing of incoming freshman, sorted by home state. This information will allow the college to plan its recruiting efforts.

Step Two:

Develop a comprehensive list of ENTITIES that could be included in your database. An entity is like a noun, a person, place, or thing about which you want to collect data for the business. Avoid naming specific pieces of data like birthdate and name; instead, focus on the entities themselves (people, places, things) such as Purchases, Inventory, Employees, Customers List as many as you can for this step.

Step Three:

Choose FOUR of the entities listed above to include in your database. Once they become part of the database, these entities are now considered TABLES in the database. Therefore, we will be developing one table for each of the entities. Essentially, you will have a relational database with four tables at the end of this step. For example, the database for Chadron State College could include: Employees, Students, Grades, and Courses.

Step Four:

For each of the four tables, list the fields or pieces of data you want to track about each of these entities. Make sure that every field is directly related to only that entity (table). Field names should not include blank spaces as those spaces can cause programming issues later. This exercise does not require the actual development of the database in database management system, but it is a good practice to keep the spaces out. To avoid spaces, field names can be two words run together like EmpNumber or they can include an underscore like Emp_Number (do not use hyphens, they are used for other purposes in IT processing, such as subtraction). Choose at least FIVE fields for each of the four tables . Begin with the table name in all caps, follow that with the field names in parentheses separated by commas. The first field name MUST be a primary key for the table. A primary key uniquely identifies every instance of the table, just like your student ID identifies you and only you in CSCs student table. For the primary key, avoid using fields like email address, birthdate, phone, or other fields that could identify multiple instances in the table, for example, a husband and wife could share an email address and it is therefore not unique to either. Use only absolutely unique fields like employeeNumber, SocialSecurityNumber, BarCodeNum, VIN_Number, etc. The primary key should appear first in the list of field names and it should be in italics. An example for a Student table follows:

CUSTOMER (StudentNumber , StudFName, StudLName, StudAddress, StudHighSchool)

For this step, use the format described and illustrated above to declare the fields in all four tables.