Assignment

Outcomes addressed in this activity:

Explain why providing support for such control issues as data security, backup and recovery, and concurrency is an important feature of the database approach

List the three problems created by data redundancy

Explain the primary defining feature of a database management system

Course Outcomes:

Identify the fundamental concepts of Database Management systems.

Directions:

You are a presales consultant for an IT services company trying to close the sale for an upgrade of the systems of XYZ Corp. XYZ Corp manufactures and distributes widgets to many different retail chains throughout the US. XYZ has a very low cost and mostly manual system, they also use Access and Excel in order to capture and analyze data, but they are finding that their data is not well-integrated and this is causing problems. The company recently had a major issue with an Excel spreadsheet where they had to rewrite a spreadsheet macro/application after having inadvertently inserted a new column into a range.

You are to create a presentation for the executives at XYZ so that they may make an informed decision as to how they might make better use of technology in managing their corporate information resources.

In your presentation, explain why providing support for such control issues as data security, backup and recovery, and concurrency are important features that they will need to implement in order to make the best use of data. You will need to explain specifically how this is accomplished by your proposed solution (an RDBMS). Explain also how the three problems created by data redundancy can be overcome using a modern RDBMS. Show them how a RDBMS can help to integrate their currently isolated pockets of data and how they may be able to improve productivity and improve decision making by making the switch to a more centralized solution. Explain how your proposed solution could have eliminated the recent issue they had with the Excel spreadsheet by providing increased data independence.

Your presentation should be at least 10 slides. Each slide should be informative and entertaining without being distracting. You only have this one opportunity to solidify the sale, so the presentation needs to be carefully focused. You need to capture their attention and hit on the key points, so you do not want too much information on each slide. At the same time, you have lots to say, so you will include a presentation notes section that somebody (maybe not you) can do the presentation completely from the slide deck you have prepared. The presentation notes are what will be said at the meeting while each slide is showing.