Database Reference
In-Depth Information
Keep in mind that you can interview users or have them write an overview
of the process. In some cases you may do both, or you may come back after
the fact and interview a user about an unclear statement.
The following statement comes from the write-up that Bill Robertson,
Mountain View Music owner and CEO, gave us regarding the company's
overall business process.
Customers log on to our Web site and place an order, or call an employee
who places the order on the customers' behalf. All orders contain the
customer information, the order detail, which has information about the
products, the quantities that the customer purchased, and the payment
method. When we receive the order into the system, the customer infor-
mation has already been checked and crucial bits, such as the customer's
address, have been verified by the site. The first thing we do is process
the order items. We make sure that the products being purchased are in
stock and we place a hold on those products. If a product is not in stock,
we place that item or the entire order on back order, depending on the
customer's preference. Products that are in stock have a hold placed on
them. Once the products are on hold, we process the payment for the
order. By law, once we accept payment, we must ship within 30 days.
This is why we make sure the product is on hold before we process the
payment. For payment, we take credit cards, gift cards, and direct bank
draft via an electronic check. After the payment has been cleared, we
send the order to the warehouse where is it picked, packed, and shipped
by our employees. We do this for about 1,000 orders per week.
This very brief overview gives us a lot of details about the type of data
that the company needs to store as well as how it uses that data. From this
we can start to develop an entity list for our conceptual model. Notice that
this is a pretty typical explanation that a user might give regarding a
process. What we like to see are clear and concise explanations without a
lot of fluff. That is exactly what the CEO has provided us here.
Modeling Key Words
Certain words that you see in the information provided you by your cus-
tomers will help you figure out the kinds of objects you should include in
the data model. There are four things to look for when examining key
words: entities, attributes, relationships, and usage detail (if any). Let's look
at the kinds of key words that would lead us to find the data diamonds in
the rough.
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