Database Systems: Design, Implementation and Management 13th Edition solution manual
- What are the potential costs of implementing a database system?
Although the database system yields considerable advantages over previous data management approaches, database systems do impose significant costs. For example:
- Increased acquisition and operating costs. Database systems require sophisticated hardware and software and highly skilled personnel. The cost of maintaining the hardware, software, and personnel required to operate and manage a database system can be substantial.
- Management complexity. Database systems interface with many different technologies and have a significant impact on a company's resources and culture. The changes introduced by the adoption of a database system must be properly managed to ensure that they help advance the company's objectives. Given the fact that databases systems hold crucial company data that are accessed from multiple sources, security issues must be assessed constantly.
- Maintaining currency. To maximize the efficiency of the database system, you must keep your system current. Therefore, you must perform frequent updates and apply the latest patches and security measures to all components. Because database technology advances rapidly, personnel training costs tend to be significant.
- Vendor dependence. Given the heavy investment in technology and personnel training, companies may be reluctant to change database vendors. As a consequence, vendors are less likely to offer pricing point advantages to existing customers and those customers may be limited in their choice of database system components.
- Use examples to compare and contrast unstructured and structured data. Which type is more prevalent in a typical business environment?
Unstructured data are data that exist in their original (raw) state, that is, in the format in which they were collected. Therefore, unstructured data exist in a format that does not lend itself to the processing that yields information. Structured data are the result of taking unstructured data and formatting (structuring) such data to facilitate storage, use, and the generation of information. You apply structure (format) based on the type of processing that you intend to perform on the data. Some data might be not ready (unstructured) for some types of processing, but they might be ready (structured) for other types of processing. For example, the data value 37890 might refer to a zip code, a sales value, or a product code. If this value represents a zip code or a product code and is stored as text, you cannot perform mathematical computations with it. On the other hand, if this value represents a sales transaction, it is necessary to format it as numeric.
If invoices are stored as images for future retrieval and display, you can scan them and save them in a graphic format. On the other hand, if you want to derive information such as monthly totals and average sales, such graphic storage would not be useful. Instead, you could store the invoice data in a (structured) spreadsheet format so that you can perform the requisite computations.
Based on sheer volume, most data is unstructured or semistructured. Data for conducting actual business transactions is usually structured.
- What are some basic database functions that a spreadsheet cannot perform.
15. What common problems do a collection of spreadsheets created by end users share with the typical file system?
A collection of spreadsheets shares several problems with the typical file system. First problem is that end users create their own, private, copies of the data, which creates issues of data ownership. This situation also creates islands of information where changes to one set of data are not reflected in all of the copies of the data. This leads to the second problem – lack of data consistency. Because the data in various spreadsheets may be intended to represent a view of the business environment, a lack of consistency in the data may lead to faulty decision making based on inaccurate data.
16. Explain the significance of the loss of direct, hands-on access to business data that users experienced with the advent of computerized data repositories.
Users lost direct, hands-on access to the business data when computerized data repositories were developed because the IT skills necessary to directly access and manipulate the data were beyond the average user's abilities, and because security precautions restricted access to the shared data. This was significant because it removed users from the direct manipulation of data and introduced significant time delays for data access. When users need answers to business questions from the data, necessity often does not give them the luxury of time to wait days, weeks, or even months for the required reports. The desire to return hands-on access to the data to the users, among other drivers, helped to propel the development of database systems. While database systems have greatly improved the ability of users to directly access data, the need to quickly manipulate data for themselves has lead to the problems of spreadsheets being used when databases are needed.