Before having children Emily Plunkett had had two very different careers, one that she was
extremely good at and one that she absolutely loved. Emily was very good at advertising and
selling goods and services but her favourite occupation was organising weddings. In 2010,
facing the future as a single parent she decided to see if she could combine her two careers
and set up a business that could provide all the items needed to cater for small or large
celebrations. Emily’s idea proved so popular that she received many requests to form a cooperative that would provide a common national web platform to promote and provide
advice on organising events and offer all types of equipment and furnishings.
Emily enlisted the help of a local web developer Liam to build a platform for Australian
Event Planning Co-operative (AEPC). Liam did a great job and Emily was very pleased with
the new AEPC website. It was intuitive to navigate and provided plenty of information to
which the co-operative members could contribute. Emily was extremely pleased when
organisations from all over Australia asked to join the co-operative. However as the number
of members of the co-operative grew, customers and supply organisation owners noticed
data anomalies occurring and an increase in information retrieval time. Additionally order
information went missing and there were some difficulties in entering new information.
Emily decided she needed to talk to Liam to see how the issues could be resolved as she
didn’t want the reputation of AEPC to be marred. Liam admitted that whilst he was good at
designing websites he had less skill and experience at developing databases. As a result
Emily and Liam have asked you, as a database design consultant to make recommendations
for a way forward. Following several consultations and investigation of the current set-up
you realise that Liam had created a flat file database and entity relationships were not
logically defined. Your recommendation is to create a Customer Relationship Management
(CRM) style database to which specific adaptions could be made at a later date. As an
experienced database designer you are fully aware that the functionality Emily would like
will not be possible to achieve in the first project. You explain the need to define a core
database system which will provide a foundation for added functionality in the future.
User Requirements
The following provides what you, Emily and Liam agree would be a good core system for the
first database design project.
Emily believes that the core database entities are co-op members, customers, equipment
items and equipment orders. You generally agree however you also know that there will be
other regular and composite entities, and business rules which will determine the entity
relationships.