PlowMasters is a locally owned and operated snow removal business. PlowMasters provides residential and commercial snow removal for clients throughout a large metropolitan area. Typical services include driveway and walkway snow removal, as well as parking lot snow maintenance for larger commercial clients.

PlowMasters’ clientele has grown over the past several snow seasons. Recent heavy snowfall, coupled with a successful advertising campaign, has increased current demand even more, and this increase in demand is expected to continue. In order to provide faster, more efficient service, PlowMasters has hired your consulting company to design, develop, and implement a computerbased system. Your development team is currently preparing the logical and physical database designs for PlowMasters.

a. What are the four steps in logical database modeling and design?

b. Several relations have been identified for this project, including removal technician, customer, service provided, equipment inventory, and services offered. What relationships exist among these relations? How should these relationships be represented?

c. Think of the attributes that would most likely be associated with the relations identified in the part b. For each data integrity control method discussed in the chapter, provide a specific example.

d. What are the guidelines for choosing indexes? Identify several fields that should be indexed.