Unit 67 Laboratory Activity: Systems Modelling

Goal: Design a Simple Database with Three Components

Materials

• None

Procedure

1. Write a short story in which you describe organizing all the books in your library onto shelves. Describe the important characteristics common to all your books and determine how you will Will you arrange them (i.e., size? author? topic?). Consider whether the books are part of a series and must be shelved together or not.
2. List the kinds of things in your story (books, shelves). These are your entities.
3. List the characteristics of each type of thing. These are the attributes of the thing. For example, a book might have a title, number of pages, publication year, author, or other characteristics by which you will identify or sort it into place on the shelf.
4. Should you consider any of your characteristics as entities in their own right (i.e., authors? topics?)
5. Consider how you will identify each physical book as a unique object. Do you have any duplicates? How will you tell them apart?
6. Determine the relationship between the books and the shelves. A book may have only one shelf that it can sit on in a one-to-one relationship, but a shelve may have many books (one-to-many relationships).
7. If you created other entities (authors, publishers, topics), be sure to describe the relationship between each entity and all the other entities, if any.
8. Give at least three examples of your entities with characteristics and relationships identified.
9. Look up some entity-relationship diagrams and use one as a template for drawing the entity-relationship diagram for your database.

Report

Describe your assumptions. Present the diagram of your database showing each entity, its characteristics, and the relationships between entities. Describe the characteristics you can use to identify and sort individual books.

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