Database and Information Retrieval

Assessment Task 1 - Survey Report

Introduction

- This assessment task is for students to develop an understanding of strengths and limitations of various data storage, retrieval methods and models. The assessment requires students to conduct a survey and report on data storage and retrieval techniques and data models.

- This is an individual assessment task that requires students to prepare a report not exceeding 1000 words, plus or minus 10%, excluding the tables for Question 4 and references.

Unit Learning Outcomes
- Of the three Unit Learning Outcomes (ULOs) of this unit, this assessment task focuses on the first two ULOs.

These are:
o ULO 1 - At the end of this unit students will be able to describe the techniques used in storing and retrieving data.
o ULO 2 - At the end of this unit students will be able to evaluate data models and apply data modelling techniques to capture the data aspects of real-world situations.
- The assessment of this report will indicate whether students can partially attain these two ULOs.

Question 1:

Create your own brief description of the following file organisations. You must use several sources for each file organisation to create your description.
a) Sequential access
b) Random access
c) Index sequential access

Question 2:
Describe in detail 3 techniques to store and retrieve data using an SQL database. Some techniques are based on SQL statements, and others based on setting the primary key value.

Question 3:

Briefly describe the following processes related to the Entity-Relationship data model:
a) Gathering business rules
b) Normalisation

Question 4:

Some data about books could include the ISBN, title, authors, edition, publisher, year of publication, and so on. For example, the following table contains some data about five books.

It is possible to create a similar table for other real world objects such as magazines, computers, cars, grocery items, clothes, people, students, musical instruments, and many more. For example, from the above book data we could create three tables, one for each of the following: book, author and publisher.

Your task is to create three tables of several rows and several columns that contain data about related entities.
- Two tables must be related in a many to many fashion.
- The third table must be related to one of the other tables in a one to many fashion.
- Include primary and foreign keys too.

The three entities are of your choice; but you cannot select related entities of book, author and publisher as in the above example.

You must cite and reference with regards to the data you obtained.