Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
most important to you in choosing a DBMS. Which of the
database management systems described in this chapter
would you choose? Why? Is it important for you to know
what sort of computer the database will run on? Why or
why not?
a presentation to persuade the board of directors to invest
$5 million to establish a competitive-intelligence organi-
zation—including people, data-gathering services, and
software tools. What key points do you need to make in
favor of this investment? What arguments can you antici-
pate that others might make?
4.
Make a list of the databases in which data about you exists.
How is the data in each database captured? Who updates
each database and how often? Is it possible for you to
request a printout of the contents of your data record from
each database? What data privacy concerns do you have?
7.
Briefly describe how visual and audio databases can be used
by companies today.
8.
Identity theft, where people steal your personal informa-
tion, continues to be a threat. Assume that you are the
database administrator for a corporation with a large
database. What steps would you implement to help prevent
people from stealing personal information from the cor-
porate database?
5.
If you were the database administrator for the iTunes
store, how might you use predictive analysis to determine
which artists and movies will sell most next year?
6.
You are the vice president of information technology for a
large, multinational consumer packaged goods company
(such as Procter & Gamble or Unilever). You must make
9.
What roles do databases play in your favorite online activ-
ities and Web sites?
PROBLEM-SOLVING EXERCISES
1.
Develop a simple data model for the music you have on
your MP3 player or in your CD collection, where each row
is a song. For each row, what attributes should you capture?
What will be the unique key for the records in your
database? Describe how you might use the database.
this list, choose two database modifications and modify the
data-entry screen to capture and store this new information.
Proposed changes:
a.
Add the date that the movie was first available to
help locate the newest releases.
2.
A video movie rental store is using a relational database to
store information on movie rentals to answer customer
questions. Each entry in the database contains the following
items: Movie ID No. (primary key), Movie Title, Year
Made, Movie Type, MPAA Rating, Number of Copies on
Hand, and Quantity Owned. Movie types are comedy,
family, drama, horror, science fiction, and western. MPAA
ratings are G, PG, PG-13, R, NC-17, and NR (not rated).
Use a single-user database management system to build a
data-entry screen to enter this data. Build a small database
with at least ten entries.
b.
Add the director's name.
c.
Add the names of three primary actors in the movie.
d.
Add a rating of one, two, three, or four stars.
e.
Add the number of Academy Award nominations.
4.
Your school maintains information about students in sev-
eral interconnected database files. The student_contact file
contains student contact information. The student_grades
file contains student grade records, and the student_finan-
cial file contains financial records including tuition and
student loans. Draw a diagram of the fields these three
files might contain, which field is a primary key in each file,
and which fields serve to relate one file to another. Use
Figure 5.7 as a guide.
3.
To improve service to their customers, the salespeople at
the video rental store have proposed a list of changes being
considered for the database in the previous exercise. From
TEAM ACTIVITIES
1.
In a group of three or four classmates, communicate with
the person at your school that supervises information sys-
tems. Find out how many databases are used by your school
and for what purpose. Also find out what policies and pro-
cedures are in place to protect the data stored from identity
thieves and other threats.
to help them in their work. What data entities and data
attributes are contained in each database? How do they
access the database to perform analysis? Have they received
training in any query or reporting tools? What do they like
about their database and what could be improved? Do any
of them use data-mining or OLAP techniques? Weighing
the information obtained, select one of these databases as
2.
As a team of three or four classmates, interview business
managers from three different businesses that use databases
