Chapter 9

Pick and Shovel Construction Company

Situation:
Pick and Shovel Construction Company is a multistate building contractor
specializing in medium-priced town homes. C. T. Scott, the owner, is in your office for
the third time today to see how the new relational database project is coming along.
Unfortunately, someone mentioned to C. T. that the delay had something to do with
achieving normalization.
“Why is all this normalization stuff so important?” he asks. “The old system worked
OK most of the time, and now you are telling me that we need all these special rules.
Why is this necessary?”

Questions:

1. How should you respond to C. T.? Write him a brief memo with your views.

      Answer: Normalization is the process of organizing the contents of a table in the database. Normalization is important to develop system performance and accuracy. Normalization splits huge amount of data in to smaller groupings in order to access the data quickly and efficiently. The main significance of Normalization is to eliminate duplication of data. Data integrity can also be maintained.Pick and Shovel Constuction Company would have to maintain large amount of database. Normalization technique helps to identify and correct inbuilt problems in a database. Normalization is useful since Pick and Shovel Construction Company would provide online transaction processing where data modifications occur frequently in a database.

2. Assume that the Pick and Shovel’s main entities are its customers, employees,
projects, and equipment. A customer can hire the company for more than one
project, and employees sometimes work on more than one project at a time.
Equipment, however, is assigned only to one project. Draw an ERD showing
those entities.

3. Add cardinality notation to your ERD.

4. Create 3NF table designs.