DVD/Video game rental shop

Pedram Emrouznejad 11L

Analysis

The database that I’m going to create is for a small DVD/Video game rental shop. The shop is very small and all their records were created by hand on paper. ‘DVDVG’ (name of shop) has expanded and now has several branches. Their old method of storing records has become very impractical.

Introduction

DVDVG have been selling and renting DVD’s and Video Game’s for almost 2 years now.

Their new system will have to include:

Data on products they currently own, such when was it last rented, how many times it has been rented, certificate, number of players, running time and other information that is related to the product
They will need to store data on all their customers so that they know what special offers they should give them. If they have rented a video game a certain number of times in a period of time they should give them offers through the post
They will also need to keep track of their products, which customers have rented or bought which products, so that they can invoice them.

The database shall allow them to:

Produce emails/reports or ordinary mail for customers
Track payment statuses and histories for customers
Record details of each customer
To produce reports of when customers have overdue products.

DVD’s

The information that needs to be stored on the DVD’s is:

DVD Name
Certificate
Genre
DVD ID
DVD Publisher
How times been rented

Video Games

Information that has to be stored on the Video games are:

Name
ID
Certificate
Publisher
Number of times rented

Customers

Customer name
Address
Telephone number
Date of ...

This is a preview of the whole essay

The database shall allow them to:

Produce emails/reports or ordinary mail for customers
Track payment statuses and histories for customers
Record details of each customer
To produce reports of when customers have overdue products.

DVD’s

The information that needs to be stored on the DVD’s is:

DVD Name
Certificate
Genre
DVD ID
DVD Publisher
How times been rented

Video Games

Information that has to be stored on the Video games are:

Name
ID
Certificate
Publisher
Number of times rented

Customers

Customer name
Address
Telephone number
Date of birth
Number of products rented (Total)
Number of products rented (Current)
Last product rented
Membership Number

Rentals

Customer name
Address
Any videos they are currently renting
Date due back for each video
Current date
Whether its overdue
Amount due if overdue

Problems

Their current system is very old and inefficient. It is a flat file, hand written system which relies entirely on human input

Problems in general with a paper based database:

When a user makes a mistake entering data, entire section of input has to be re-written
Most of the data has to be re-written for every different place it is used, which creates a lot of redundant data
As the company expands, so does its database. This requires a lot of space and becomes harder to store.
It takes a lot of time to find a specific piece of data because the entire database has to be searched.

Problems specific to their database:

When the want to find customers that fit a certain criteria, for example when they want to send out offers/advertisements to customers, they have to sort through their entire database manually to find the customers that fit the criteria. This means customers sometimes do not receive information that may otherwise have led to more customs.
Some of their records might have been rendered illegible due to poor data maintenance. Since their databases are on paper, some they have been ripped or have had tea and other stuff spilled on them.
Their database relies completely on human input, which also makes their manual system highly susceptible to human error.