Practice with Relational Databases

Why this is important

A 13 Sep 2014 report in The Economist spoke about the changing information landscape in regard to one profession.

"This is an information war," says Omar Tawakol, the boss of BlueKai, a data broker, which tracks users online and sells that intelligence to companies. "This is 100% about having more information about the customer and being able to generate more commerce as a result of it." ... BlueKai, for example, compiles around 1 billion profiles of potential customers around the world, each with an average of 50 attributes.

A billion entities, each with 50 attributes

Watch this video

As you do that, think about these questions

  1. Who is the musician? [Jake Shimabukoro]
  2. What is the name of the piece he is playing? [While my guitar gently weeps]
  3. Who wrote the piece he is playing? [George Harrison]
  4. Did he write other works? [one might assume so]
  5. Who has also played this work? [how are they related?]

Thinking back to the previous session ...

  1. How many and what entity classes are engaged here?
  2. What are the attributes for each of the entities?
  3. What are the relationships between the entity classes?
  4. If we set up a relational database containing these entities, can we add new entities to the database without having to modify the basic relationships?

In class today,

we will analyze the information we have and then create an entity relationship model,
from which we will create a relational database.

[top]