LEARNING JOURNAL UNIT 2

As we can see from the data model above the entities and its attributes contain important
information regarding the store for there might be a few of the same stores, but the information
captured should be different for each store and therefore a database mangement system will be
created for the data model above. The database system will manage the following information,
those of the customer, sales, store, sales items and the information of the items itself.

For customer the system will hold the information, customer lastname, firstname, address,
phone and email. For sale, the system will hold the information, saledate, subtotal, tax, and
total. And for store the information storename, storephone and store email will be held in the
system. The system will also hold the sale item information which will be the item price, and also
the item information which will be the description and the cost of the item.

With all these information the store or different stores can hold all valuable information in their
database management system for numerous reasons but one of the most important would b to
keep track of everything. Having a DBMS will result in record keeping because also that if a
problem may occur there will be unique identifiers of customer and sale information.

CARDINALITIES:

In this specific data model we can see that there are quite a number of relationships between
some of the entities as well as the attributes and one that is quickly visible is of those between
the sale and sale item entities as we have learned, “Many-to-many relationships are not
supported by the relational model and must be resolved by splitting the original M:M relationship
set into two 1:M relationship sets. Usually, the unique identifiers of the two entity sets
participate in building the unique identifier of the third entity set” (Sharma, et al. 2010. p73). For
this data model it has been shown that a third entity set has been created for item because if
there is a problem with an item and you do not know which item it may be because there is no
unique identifier for that item, that might cause difficulties.

There are also cardinalities between the customer and sale entities because a customer can
buy from one sale, but th sale can be sold to many customers, and also between sale and store
entity because a store can have many sales on a day, but the sale might only be at one specific
store. The cardinality between sale and sale item is that a sale might have one or many sale
items, but only one sale item might be available at a sale. The cardinality between sale item and
item is one to one because sale item refers to only one item.

Reference:

Sharma, N., Perniu, L., Chong, R. F., Iyer, A., Nandan, C., Mitea, A. C., Nonvinkere, M. &
Danubianu, M. (2010). Database fundamentals. IBM Canada. Retrieved from:
file:///home/chronos/u-1de6c65a8b923c4fcfe09f7ac213b79a90f0d54a/MyFiles/Downloads/
Getting%20Started%20with%20DB2%20Express-C.pdf