Question

Database designers must often make design compromises that are triggered by conflicting goals. Describe these challenges and how the effect the database development process. Cite real life applications.

Answer 1

Database designers often must make design compromises that are triggered by conflicting goals, such as adherence to design standards (design elegance), processing speed, and information requirements.

Design standards

The database design must conform to design standards. Such standards have guides in developing logical structures that minimize data redundancies, thereby minimizing the likelihood that destructive data anomalies will occur. These standards prescribe avoiding nulls to the greatest extent possible. In short, design standards allow you to work with well-defined components and to evaluate the interaction of those components with some precision. Without design standards, it is nearly impossible to formulate a proper design process, to evaluate an existing design, or to trace the likely logical impact of changes in design.

Processing speed

In many organizations, particularly those generating large numbers of transactions, high processing speeds are often a top priority in database design. High processing speed means minimal access time, which may be achieved by minimizing the number and complexity of logically desirable relationships. For example, a “perfect” design might use a 1:1 relationship to avoid nulls, while a higher transaction-speed design might combine the two tables to avoid the use of an additional relationship, using dummy entries to avoid the nulls. If the focus is on data-retrieval speed, it might also be forced to include derived attributes in the design.

Information requirements

The quest for timely information might be the focus of database design. Complex information requirements may dictate data transformations, and they may expand the number of entities and attributes within the design. Therefore, the database may have to sacrifice some of its “clean” design structures and/or some of its high transaction speed to ensure maximum information generation.A design that meets all logical requirements and design conventions is an important goal.

Example

1.Order management system database.

2. Government Organizations

Government organizations around the world are constantly collecting data for research, defense, legislation, and humanitarianism purposes, to name a few. This data is collected, stored and analyzed using powerful and far-reaching database services.

3.Social Media

Every social media platform stores reams of user information in databases used to recommend friends, businesses, products, and topics to the end user. This cross-referencing of data is immensely complex and uses highly reliable and capable database software. For example, MySQL is used in Facebook data centers.