Databases Products

I never realized until recently how many products and programs rely on databases. Whether it is the address book within my Personal Digital Assistant (PDA) or the bookkeeping software QuickBooks that manages my finances. Databases are everywhere! With an educational institution the size of TUI, it would only make sense that they would use a database to manage many of the student services. However, what type of database or software would TUI use to manage this database? During this paper, I will discuss the type of database, software, and key structure I would choose if I were a database administrator at TUI.

The first and most important thing an administrator must do is pick the type of databse they are going to use. Because TUI has a large student population I would have to recommend using the Hierarchical Database model. Not only because of the large amounts of students but also because those students will access the database via several means. Since TUI is a school that is exclusively online students will enter information via the web into the database. Thus the Hierarchical database is perfect because it uses a parent/child relationship to store data. in such a system are thought of in terms of children and parents such that a child may only have one parent but a parent can have multiple children. Parents and children are tied together by links called "pointers" (perhaps physical addresses inside the file system). A parent will have a list of pointers to each of their children. This child/parent rule assures that data is systematically accessible. (www.britannica.com) To get to a low-level table, you start at the root and work your way down through the tree until you reach your target. For instance, if I were looking for my student information I would start at the parent, which would be College of Information Systems. The first child would be Database Technology and Database Administration, and the child below that would be my student identifier, which TUI uses as my primary key. Once someone gained access to my student identifier, they would gain access to my student information. As you can see this type of a structure would be ideal for an educational institution. As I stated earlier, TUI uses the issued student identifier as the primary key.

The primary key is an essential part of a database. Each database table needs a primary key because it ensures row-level access. If you choose a primary key that is not easily confused, you can specify a primary key value, which lets you query each table row independently