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Introduction

Planning my database Introduction: I first needed to know who I was doing it for. It was the librarian at my school Mrs Flude she wanted to keep the information where it was safe and easy to access which would make it faster for her and the students. The two main problems of the current system are: 1st problem: They have to use an index to find books, and this is slow and very inefficient. 2nd problem: They use a card index to keep all the information needed about the students and to keep track of which students have books, this method is not reliable because you can mess up or mix up the cards or lose them and it also takes a long time which leads to inefficiency. The solution to fixing these problems is creating a database; a database is a collection of information stored in a computer in a systematic way, such that a computer program can consult it to answer questions. Before I started using the computer to make my database, I made a rough copy of what I wanted my database to look like and how it would function. It was a table which I had to fill in with information about my database. I wanted my database to be reliable and fast, to make it fast I had to make it simple and easy to use. ...read more.

Middle

This information will help the librarian find who has an overdue book and were to find him/her. Field name Data type Data Format Data size Why is this data important Student number Auto number Number Up to 1500 It makes issuing books easier Students name Text Text Up to 50 To know who has borrowed a book Sex Text Text Up to 1 Helps with surveys regarding with which books appeal to the sexes Address Number & text Number & text Up to 100 To trace overdue returns Form Number and text Number & text Up to 20 Again to trace late returns I then did a table for issues as shown below: Field name Data type Data Format Data size Why is this data important issues id Number Number Up to 1500 To know which issue you are dealing with student id Number Number Up to 1500 To know which student borrowed a book book id Number Number Up to 10000 To know which book was taken out date borrowed Date Date Up to 12 To when the book was taken out date due back Date Date Up to 12 To know when the book should be returned Above is the third section of my database, which is the 'issues section', this section is necessary because it shows which books have been taken out and who has taken them out and the details of the book and the person who has borrowed the book. ...read more.

Conclusion

In my database I made the 'Book ID', 'Issues ID' and the 'Student number' unique or primary keys. To do this I had open a table in design view and then selected the field I wanted to make a primary key and I then clicked on the primary key symbol on the toolbar. ABOVE: is the highlighted Book id to its left is the primary key symbol. This is the student number. Above is the issues ID. As I mentioned above that my database was inefficient because when you made any changes you had to repeatedly key in those changes in other tables, to get around this I had to make my database 'Relational', a relational database is a method of structuring data as collections of tables that are logically associated to each other by shared attributes, a relational database has the flexibility to generate new tables from existing records that meet specified criteria. With my database I decided the following criteria to have a relationship: In the student table, the student number field has a 1 next to it. This means that the entry in that field can only appear once. The same is true of book ID in the books table. However, both of these fields can appear many times in the issues table (hence the infinity sign being next to them). This shows that one student can take out a variety of books and that one book can be taken out many times. ?? ?? ?? ?? NAME: Tonderai Chinodyaruswa REG. NO: 1028 BABINGTON CENTRE NO: 25112 02/05/2007 ...read more.

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