Database Environment Paper 1

Database Environment Paper

Nicholas Fletcher
DBM/380
07/06/2014
James Johnsen


Database Environment Paper 2



Database Environment Paper

After 45 minutes of walking through the cummers museum and realizing that
Jacksonville is home to four beautiful museums. These museums will not only captivate you but
also tell you a story in history. By understanding this I walk through the commer museum in
amazement but being from a IT background my mind soon begin to wonder how do they keep
track all of these beautiful works of art. I mean there's things that have to be taken into
consideration. In example who is the artist, the location where the art is display, can it be or is it
on loan, the year the artist created the artwork. After thinking about this for a few minutes a
database popped in to my mind. A database management system can easily do all of these things
and more. A museum can choose a variety of databases to complete this task but just for
explanation purposes we're going to use Microsoft access to help us understand how a database
can complete the task of tracking the artwork and giving us an accurate account and location.
Let's keep in mind while we are designing and building the database three words; real,
conceptual, and representations if we keep these three keywords at the forefront of our design we
will design a usable and efficient database. Simply put the design of a database is to define the
structure of data that can be queried and give out meaningful information to the end-user. And
will design database also allows for easy maintenance and upkeep. With over 5000 works of arts
in the cummers museum there's a lot of data that has to be enter into access on the front and
ongoing in order for the museum to be able to used the software. But in order to do this we must
first understand how the data or where the data is entered in Microsoft access. Data is stored in
what is called a tables, each table consists of data about a specific subject in example; painters
Database Environment Paper 3

name, date art was created, location ,Address, zip code, city. By putting data in a table that is
specific it allows for changing of data in specific table and it will automatically populating
throughout the whole database. This also allows for different types of queriers making the
database efficient. Let also look at what is a query. A query is a search by the end users which
displays usable information. A query can sometimes and most time often will also display
subsets of data as well. The subsets of the table is referred to as A field or as an attribute. To
understand this a little better you can think about the squares in Microsoft excel those squares are
fields and/or attributes is a place with database tables used to store one piece of given data. When
entering data into a table or A field is called an entry. An entry is data that needs to be tracked.
Now the question how can all of this information help the museum track there artwork. When
billing the initial database you can one can use the artwork name as the interest in the fields or
attributes can be the artist name the date the artist created the piece of artwork artwork that
exactly where the artwork is located inside the singing is the artwork being load out or is it all
from another museum what does the museum that peace of artwork. After entering all of the
fields and tables we can then run a ERD report to help us see how the database is coming along
by doing so were able to see from it overview what tables relate to what and in sure that all of the
tables that need to talk to each other are doing so. It is easy to see if you museum created a
database as explained above that you can effortlessly track each keys of work.





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References
What is a Database. (2011). Retrieved from
http://databases.about.com/od/specificproducts/a/whatisadatabase.htm

What Is Database Architecture. (2003-2014). Retrieved from
http://degreedirectory.org/articles/What_is_Database_Architecture.html

Coronel, C., Morris, S., & Rob, P. (2013 ). Database Systems (10th ed.). : Cengage
Learning