Our focus in week 8 will be on database theory. We will concentrate on the following topics:
1. Reading entity-relationship diagrams. An entity-relationship (E-R) diagram is the blueprint of a database. It provides us with a concise way of seeing the entities (tables) and how these entities are related. This is critical if we want to design queries for data extraction.
2. Understanding the process for designing a normalized database. We will look at several examples based on mini cases and see how we can design a normalized data base. One of these examples is for a transportation company. As we will see this database covers many different areas within the company. We will use this as an example for transitioning into the discussion on enterprise systems.
3. In our seminar, we will use the sqldf package in R in order to write sql queries for data extraction. We will start with queries based on data from a single table and make our way to more advanced queries based on multiple tables.
Topics and Readings for Week 8
Reading: Read chapters 5 and 6
Assignments for Week 8
The online quiz will be a based on chapters 5, and material from the seminar. The quiz will be available on Friday at 12:30 pm.