Milestone One Guidelines

Presentation for the Chief Information Officer (CIO) Overview:

IT professionals are often tasked with optimizing, tuning, and resolving various errors associated with large commercial database systems. As the world becomes more and more focused on the collection and use of data for various purposes, there is a greater need for building database applications that serve numerous complex functions. The final assessment will provide a comprehensive overview of the concepts, techniques, and skills that you have acquired throughout the course. The ability to interface a database management system with other applications and even third-party services is a commonly performed task in this discipline. The scenario, presented below, provides a real-world situation in which such skills will need to be employed.

Scenario:

The County of Everstone is a large county in a densely populated state in the United States. This county has a total of 34 incorporated cities within its boundaries. Overall, the county has a population exceeding 4 million residents. The county employs a proprietary database management system that is responsible for the county's property tax assessment, parcel, and payment information. In a recent initiative, the county has been highly promoting the use of its online property tax payment and lookup information to reduce mailed payments and in-office visits. The marketing campaign for online property tax payments and information lookup has been highly successful. However, the county's database systems have not sufficiently handled the increased traffic. As such, the web application available to residents often experiences high amounts of latency, frequently locks up, or in many instances is unavailable.

The board of directors has asked executive IT management to look into the issue and provide a prompt resolution to the matter. A review of the hardware and software systems that the database management systems employ reveals that these systems "should" be able to take the capacity and load. Therefore, the IT management has ruled out the hardware systems as being the issue. Upon further investigation, a lead database systems administrator preliminarily reports that the issue appears to stem not from the hardware, but rather from a need to provide performance tuning on the database. The database design seems to be the culprit, since this database systems administrator noted large quantities of duplicated data, poorly written database queries, and triggers.

Furthermore, the chief information officer (CIO) has also directed the web programmers and web developers to look at the web application for potential issues. The web development team has reported that while no design or programming issues were found with the web application, the stored procedures (queries) that it runs from the database server take long periods of time to run and frequently lock up the web servers. They suspect the queries were not designed for efficiency, since they were created before more individuals started using the online property tax payment system.

Prompt:

Review the scenario and create a presentation for the CIO that addresses, in detail, the key issues pertaining to performance and database efficiency, while touching on recommendations for improvements.

Specifically, the following critical elements must be addressed during your presentation:

I. Performance Tuning: Describe what potential types of tuning could be done to enhance database performance, and how you determined this from your analysis of the provided information.

II. Query Design: Explain the application of query design and how queries can be made more efficient, in general, according to industry best practices. Your discussion should specifically touch upon, at minimum, issues relating to joins, sub-queries, and sorting.

III. Data Duplication and Redundancy: Provide an explanation of potential database normalization and other techniques that can be utilized to reduce data duplication and redundancy within the scenario organization. Describe areas where database redundancy could be occurring. Be sure to identify potential techniques that would improve the database within the context of the problem.

IV. Multiple-User Access Issues and Errors:

a) Describe various applicable methods that will resolve record concurrency errors and issues as they occur in the scenario.
b) Describe methods that could be used to enhance multi-user access within the context of the commercial database used in the scenario. Be sure to defend your reasoning for recommending these methods.