Analysis of Customer and User Needs - Essay Example

For example, if a patient's current condition is required to be known, then all the necessary particulars of the patient will be required along with details of the treatments given, the response of the treatments, and general health progress. 1. A foreseeable challenge could be that the number of patients will grow over time. It is therefore essential to minimize data redundancy and lack of coherency issues at the design stage through normalization and ensuring that relationships between the relational tables are clearly and appropriately defined.

This will ensure the database can cope well with the increase over time instead of becoming too complex to handle. 2. It is of the utmost importance to ensure that health care workers have not only all the required information presented to them about each patient when requested, but also that the information is up-to-date and provided in real-time. This is to ensure that no important decision is taken by a health care worker at the center based on old information or historical data that is no longer valid.

Although not directly related to database design, another feasibility issue that could impact how well the design is implemented and how many essential design features are incorporated is the budget. The MySQL software itself will be free, but the development costs and the cost of the hardware need to be considered. In case the budget is tight then a distinction should be drawn between the most essential elements and features, and extras that can be down without, at least for now. Besides cost, another major constraint is time.