Database systems analysis & design - Assignment Example

It keeps a record of the students in the university. Each student record includes personal details, the departments that they are majoring in, any minors they might have chosen, the courses a department offers that they might be enrolled in, the particular section of a course they might be in and the instructor teaching them in that particular section. The system helps issues a grade report for a student indicating the marks obtained in a section and the grade awarded. The University System has two stakeholders; the Administrators and the Students.

This section highlights the role of each stakeholder in the system. The proposed data model has to consider these roles in its design. The administrators are users who perform the managerial tasks of the system. They have the privilege of adding, reading, updating and deleting details and records of students, courses, sections, grades and departments. They can perform advanced level statistical queries on the data stored in the system. An administrator could even be the Dean of the university.

The Students are the users that only have the privilege to reading their grade report for each course. Students do not have any privilege of adding, updating or deleting any type of information to the database. Top-down modelling approach was used in formulating the data model for the University System database. Therefore, a series of sub-diagrams were designed first to lay the ground for the final Entity Relationship Attribute (ERA) diagram. The entity relationship (ER) model was formulated first once the entities and their relationships were identified.

The Entity Attribute (EA) Model was designed next once the attributes for each entity were identified. Thereafter, relationship sets and identifiers were selected from the ER Model forming the final ERA diagram. Robinson notation was used in designing the database model. The first phase was to