Lab 2: Modifying A Database Design In Visio

Lab 2 Modifying A Database Design In Visiothis Assignment Contains Tw

Review the database design from Lab 1: Creating a Database Design in Visio, and modify the diagram to include entities and attributes based on the provided scenario where the college needs to track students, courses, and instructors with specific details. Create appropriate relationships between entities using Microsoft Visio (or an open source equivalent), and submit the diagram as a Visio file. Additionally, write a one to two-page paper discussing how well the Visio diagram reflects the database design, any assumptions made about business rules, and how these influenced the diagram and relationships. The paper should be double-spaced, in Times New Roman font size 12, with one-inch margins, and include a cover page with the assignment title, student’s name, professor’s name, course title, and date.

Paper For Above instruction

The process of modifying a database design using Visio involves understanding the specific data requirements of an organization and translating those into a coherent diagram that accurately reflects the intended data relationships. For this assignment, the focus was on creating a database for a college that tracks students, courses, and instructors, incorporating various attributes and relationships that support the college's administrative needs.

The initial step involved reviewing the previous database diagram from Lab 1, which served as the foundation for these modifications. The updated diagram needed to include entities such as Student, Course, Instructor, and possibly Department, along with their respective attributes. For students, pertinent attributes include student ID, name, address, start date, phone numbers and their types, email addresses and their types, gender, and birth date. Creating these detailed attributes ensures that the database can handle comprehensive student information, vital for administrative functions and reporting.

Similarly, the Course entity required attributes such as course ID, course name, department, quarters offered, sections, and instructor. The Instructor entity had to include instructor ID, name, address, phone numbers and types, email addresses and types, gender, birth date, and the list of courses they are qualified to teach. Capturing instructor qualifications is crucial for assigning appropriate instructors to courses, which helps in maintaining academic standards.

Establishing relationships between these entities involved identifying how the data points connect. A typical relationship would be that a Student enrolls in multiple Courses, and a Course can have many Students—representing a many-to-many relationship which would require an associative entity like Enrollment to accurately model this. Instructors are linked to Courses via the instructor ID, signifying a one-to-many relationship from Instructor to Course, assuming each course has one instructor. This relationship is essential for managing course assignments and scheduling.

While creating the diagram, assumptions were necessary regarding certain business rules. For example, I assumed that each course is assigned to a single instructor, but instructors can teach multiple courses. Phone numbers and email addresses are stored with their types to allow multiple contact methods per individual, reflecting real-world communication preferences. It was also assumed that students can have multiple phone numbers and emails, which aligns with common practices but was not explicitly defined in the scenario, demonstrating the flexibility needed for real-world database design.

In terms of the diagram's reflection of the database design, I believe it reasonably captures the core entities and their relationships, based on the provided scenario. The use of primary keys and foreign keys should facilitate referential integrity and ease of data retrieval. However, the design could be further refined by adding attributes such as course capacity, prerequisites, or detailed scheduling information, but these were beyond the scope of the assignment prompt.

Overall, this exercise demonstrated the importance of understanding business rules and translating them visually into a database schema. It highlighted how assumptions about entity relationships significantly impact the design, especially when certain details are open to interpretation. Properly modeling these relationships ensures a functional and scalable database that supports the college's operations effectively.

References

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