Competency 8, Steps Needed in Developing a Well - Designed Information System

Like I stated previously, the first thing we had to do was alot of research! We interviewed 2 separate information specialists (As stated in Comp. 3), and held a variety of meetings with our instructor, Arlene. All research was very informative and necessary to insure a solid foundation. It is important that all needs of our database were considered before any work was actually done in our Database Software (Microsoft Access 97).

We then diagrammed a story board of each of our tables. We had to define relationships to insure one to many links between tables. This was especially important to insure Referential Integrity. That would in turn allow us to maintain the documents with Cascade Updates & Deletes. Once we were convinced we had a solid foundation. We created minimum portions of our 5 separate tables and created our proposed relationships. We did a test run through a number of queries to see if it would work. Fortunately for our group it worked the way we planned. From here on it was just work work work in Access to start importing an extremely large group consolidation of records.

One of our main design desisions included incorporating everything we could possibly want information wise into the structure. For instance I felt it was very important for my needs to be able to query individual BPM's of each available song... That in itself could take years considering the combined records of my team is well over 1500 records. Nevertheless I made this a field to build on later. All we have to do now is fill in the blanks instead of messing around with modifying the structure. Include all possible fields within there tables to insure the relationships work. If a query is run on a field that contains no information then it will just come up blank. Nevertheless, it is there and it works for future plans.

We also ran into a major design decision to counteract the many to many relationship imposed by our Style Table. To fix this problem we had to "normalize" this table ( more info on this in Comp. 11)