Database Reference
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staging area in the warehouse. The staging area is nothing more than a
space where product can be stacked until there is time to move it to the
shelves. The shelves in the warehouse are divided into bins, which specify
the row, column, and shelf on which the product is stored. Each bin is
given a unique identifying number that makes it easy for the warehouse
employees to locate. Additionally, a large bin may be made up of several
smaller bins to store small products.
Product is accounted for in one of two ways. First, generic products, such
as guitar picks or strings, are simply counted and that total is recorded.
Each time a generic, or nonserialized, part is sold, the system simply
needs to deduct one from inventory. Some larger, usually high-dollar
items are stored by serial number. These serialized parts must be tracked
individually. This means that if we receive 300 serialized flutes, we need
to know where all 300 are and which one we actually sold to a customer.
Using what we have in the flowchart and what we got from the ware-
house manager, we can again make some conclusions about entities, at-
tributes, and relationships. The process is much the same as before; you
comb the information for clues. The following is the entity list that we can
deduce from the given information about the warehouse:
Nonserialized Products
Serialized Products
Employee
Customer
Purchase Order
Purchase Order Detail
Bins
Vendors
This list contains some of the same entities that were in our first list:
products, employees, and customers. For now this isn't a problem, but you
want to make sure you consolidate the list before you proceed to the mod-
eling phase. Also, we assumed an entity called purchase order detail,
making a purchase order similar to a customer order. We do not get very
much about attributes from the warehouse manager, but we can flesh it out
later. As far as relationships go, we can determine a few more things from
the data we now have. The following list shows the relationships we can
determine:
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