CHAPTER TWO
Report Body
2.2 Project Design
In order to design a website, the relational database must be designed first. Conceptual design can be divided into two parts: The data model and the process model. The data model focuses on what data should be stored in the database while the process model deals with how the data is processed. To put this in the context of the relational database, the data model is used to design the relational tables. The process model is used to design the queries that will access and perform operations on those tables.
2.2.1 Data Model
A data model is a conceptual representation of the data structures that are required by a database. The first step in designing a database is to develop an Entity-Relation Diagram (ERD). The ERD serves as a blueprint from which a relational database may be deduced. Figure 1 shows the ERD for the project and later we will show the transformation from ERD to the Relational model.
Fig 1: Data Modeling of the whole project
Entity A matches exactly one record in entity B and every record in B matches exactly one record in A. One to many means that every record in A matches zero or more records in B and every record in B matches exactly one record in A. If there is a one to many relationships between two entities, then these entities are represented as Associative Entities. In the Relational Database model, each of the entities will be transformed into a table. The tables are shown below along with the attributes.
2.2.1.1 Database Design
In this section, the basic structure of the tables composing the database for the project are shown along with information about primary and foreign keys.
