Introduction - Database Processing: Fundamentals, Design, and Implementation - page 7

Application Example

Users

Number
of Users

Typical Size Remarks

Sales contact
manager

Salesperson 1 2,000 rows Products such as GoldMine and

Act! are database centric.

Patient appointment
(doctor, dentist)

Medical office 15 to 50 100,000 rows Vertical market software vendors

incorporate databases into their
software products.

Customer
relationship
management (CRM)

Sales, marketing,
or customer
service
departments

500 10 million rows Major vendors such as Microsoft

and Oracle PeopleSoft
Enterprise build applications
around the database.

Enterprise resource
planning (ERP)

An entire
organization

5,000 10 million+

rows

SAP uses a database as a
central repository for
ERP data.

E-commerce site Internet users Possibly

millions

1 billion+
rows

Drugstore.com has a database
that grows at the rate of
20 million rows per day!

Digital dashboard Senior managers 500 100,000 rows Extractions, summaries, and

consolidations of operational
databases.

Data mining Business analysts 25 100,000 to

millions+

Data are extracted, reformatted,
cleaned, and filtered for use
by statistical data mining tools.

Figure 1-5
Example Database
applications

purchasing, and other business functions. SAP is the leading vendor of ERP applications, and
a key element of its product is a database that integrates data from these various business
functions. An ERP system may have 5,000 or more users and perhaps 100 million rows in
several hundred tables.

e-Commerce Database applications
E-commerce is another important database application. Databases are a key component of
e-commerce order entry, billing, shipping, and customer support. Surprisingly, however, the
largest databases at an e-commerce site are not order-processing databases. The largest da-
tabases are those that track customer browser behavior. Most of the prominent e-commerce
companies, such as Amazon.com ( www.amazon.com ) and Drugstore.com ( www.drugstore
.com ) keep track of the Web pages and the Web page components that they send to their
customers. They also track customer clicks, additions to shopping carts, order purchases,
abandoned shopping carts, and so forth.
E-commerce companies use Web activity databases to determine which items on a Web
page are popular and successful and which are not. They also can conduct experiments to
determine if a purple background generates more orders than a blue one and so forth. Such
Web usage databases are huge. For example, Drugstore.com adds 20 million rows to its Web
log database each day!

Reporting and Data Mining Database applications
Two other example applications in Figure 1-5 are digital dashboards and data mining applica-
tions. These applications use the data generated by order processing and other operational