In the second half of the course our focus will shift to information technology related to tactical and operational issues (we will use analytics to support decision making at the tactical and operational level). The topic for this week will be on database theory. We will learn about database theory, because data is the fuel of analytics.
More specifically our focus for this week will be on the following topics: 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.
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 database.
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 chapter 5
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.
