MIS-CH6: Foundation of BUsiness Intelligence: Databases & IS

Editor's Notes

• #3: This chapter discusses the role of databases for managing a firm’s data and providing the foundation for business intelligence. Ask students to describe any databases they have encountered or used at work or in their personal use on the Web. For example, Google and Amazon are database driven Web sites, as are travel reservation Web sites, MySpace, Facebook, and, of course, iTunes. Ask students why these sites are driven by databases—what is it about databases that makes the creation and use of these sites more efficient?
• #4: In an age of nonorganic corporate growth where companies grow by acquiring other companies, business firms quickly become a collection of hundreds of databases, e-mail systems, personnel systems, accounting systems, and manufacturing systems, none of which can communicate with one another. Even if firms grow organically without acquisitions it is common for separate departments and divisions to have their own systems and databases. Firms in this case suffer the same result: the firm becomes a collection of systems that cannot share information. This creates a demand for powerful, enterprise-wide or firm-wide databases that can bring order to the chaos.
• #5: In an age of nonorganic corporate growth where companies grow by acquiring other companies, business firms quickly become a collection of hundreds of databases, e-mail systems, personnel systems, accounting systems, and manufacturing systems, none of which can communicate with one another. Even if firms grow organically without acquisitions it is common for separate departments and divisions to have their own systems and databases. Firms in this case suffer the same result: the firm becomes a collection of systems that cannot share information. This creates a demand for powerful, enterprise-wide or firm-wide databases that can bring order to the chaos.
• #6: This slide describes a hierarchy of data that is used to store information in a database, progressing from the database as the top-level holder of information down through the field, which stores information about an entity’s attribute. This hierarchy is illustrated by the graphic on the next slide. Ask students to come up with some other entities that might be found in a university database (Student, Professor, etc.). What attributes (characteristics) would be important to store in the database?
• #7: This graphic illustrates the hierarchy of data found in a database. It shows the student course file grouped with files on students’ personal histories and financial backgrounds that form the student database. It illustrates what data is found at each hierarchical level, from the database level down. Making up the smallest information unit, the field, are smaller units of data, common to all applications: bits and bytes. A bit stores a single binary digit, 0 or 1, and a byte stores a group of digits to represent a single character, number, or other symbol.
• #8: This slide discusses the problems in data management that occur in a traditional file environment. In a traditional file environment, different functions in the business (accounting, finance, HR, etc.) maintained their own separate files and databases. Ask students to describe further why data redundancy and inconsistency pose problems? What kinds of problems happen when data is redundant or inconsistent. Ask students to give an example of program-data dependence. What makes the traditional file environment inflexible?
• #9: This graphic illustrates a traditional environment, in which different business functions maintain separate data and applications to store and access that data. Ask students what kinds of data might be shared between accounting/finance and HR. What about between sales and marketing and manufacturing?
• #10: This slide defines and describes databases and DBMS. Ask students to explain what the difference is between a database and a DBMS. What is the physical view of data? What is the logical view of data?
• #11: This graphic illustrates what is meant by providing different logical views of data. The orange rectangles represent two different views in an HR database, one for reviewing employee benefits, the other for accessing payroll records. The students can think of the green cylinder as the physical view, which shows how the data are actually organized and stored on the physical media. The physical data do not change, but a DBMS can create many different logical views to suit different needs of users.
• #12: This slide introduces the most common type of DBMS in use with PCs, servers, and mainframes today, the relational database. Ask students why these DBMS are called relational. Ask students for examples of RDBMS software popular today and if they have every used any of this software. You can walk students through an example database that you have prepared in Access or use one of the exercise data tables found at the end of the chapter. Identify rows, fields, and primary key.
• #13: The graphic on this slide illustrates two tables in a relational DBMS. Ask students what the entity on this slide and the next are. The key field in the Supplier table is the Supplier number. What is the purpose of the key field?
• #14: This slide describes how information is retrieved from a relational database. These operations (SELECT, JOIN, PROJECT) are like programming statements and are used by DBMS developers. For example, looking at the last two slides showing the Supplier and Parts table, you would use what kind of an operation to show the Parts records along with the appropriate supplier's name? Access has wizards for these commands.
• #15: This graphic illustrates the result from combining the SELECT, JOIN, and PROJECT operations to create a subset of data. The SELECT operation retrieves just those parts in the PART table whose part number is 137 or 150. The JOIN operation uses the foreign key of the Supplier Number provided by the PART table to locate supplier data from the Supplier Table for just those records selected in the SELECT operation. Finally, the PROJECT operation limits the columns to be shown to be simply the part number, part name, supplier number, and supplier name (orange rectangle).
• #16: This slide discusses other types of DBMS. Ask students why one would want to store social media data in a non-relational database? The answer: social media involves many different file types, and the information is not easily organized into tables of columns and rows. Another option for businesses is to license database software “from the cloud.” What would be an advantage to using a database service? (A primary answer is scalability—you pay only for the exact services you need.)
• #17: This slide discusses the three main capabilities of a DBMS: its data definition capability, the data dictionary, and a data manipulation language. Ask students to describe what characteristics of data would be stored by a data dictionary (name, description, size, type, format, other properties of a field). For a large company, a data dictionary might also store characteristics such as usage, ownership, authorization, security, users. Note that the data manipulation language is the tool that requests operations such as SELECT and JOIN to be performed on data.
• #18: This graphic shows the data dictionary capability of Microsoft Access. For the field “Supplier Name” selected in the top pane, definitions can be configured in the General tab in the bottom pane. These General characteristics are Fields Size, Format, Input Mask, Caption, Default Value, Validation Rule, Validation Text, Required, Allow Zero Length, Indexed, Unicode Compression, IME mode, IME Sentence Mode, and Smart Tags.
• #19: This graphic shows an example SQL statement that would be used to retrieve data from a database. In this case, the SQL statement is retrieving records from the PART table illustrated on Slide 14 (Figure 6-5) whose Part Number is either 137 or 150. Ask students to relate what each phrase of this statement is doing. (For example, the statement says to take the following columns: Part_Number, Part_Name, Supplier Number, Supplier Name, from the two tables Part and Supplier, when the following two conditions are true …)
• #20: This graphic illustrates a Microsoft Access query that performs the same operation as the SQL query in the last slide. The query pane at the bottom shows the fields that are requested (Fields), the relevant Tables (Table), the fields that will be displayed in the results (Show), and the criteria limiting the results to Part numbers 137 and 150 (Criteria).
• #21: This slide describes activities involved in designing a database. To create an efficient database, you must know what the relationships are among the various data elements, the types of data that will be stored, and how the organization will need to manage the data. Note that the conceptual database design is concerned with how the data elements will be grouped, what data in what tables will make the most efficient organizations.
• #22: The graphics on this slide and the next illustrate the process of normalization. Here, one table lists the relevant data elements for the entity ORDER. These include all of the details about the order, the part, the supplier. An order can include more than one part, and it may be that several parts are supplied by the same supplier. However, using this table, the supplier’s name, and other information might need to be stored several times on the order list.
• #23: This graphic shows the normalized tables. The Order table has been broken down into four smaller, related tables. Notice that the Order table contains only two unique attributes, Order Number and Order Date. The multiple items ordered are stored using the Line_Item table. The normalization means that very little data has to be duplicated when creating orders, most of the information can be retrieved by using keys to the Part and Supplier tables. It is important to note that relational database systems try to enforce referential integrity rules to ensure that relationships between coupled tables remain consistent. When one table has a foreign key that points to another table, you may not add a record to the table with the foreign key unless there is a corresponding record in the linked table. For example, foreign key Supplier_Number links the PART table to the SUPPLIER table. Referential integrity means that a new part can’t be added to the part table without a valid supplier number existing in the Supplier table. It also means that if a supplier is deleted, any corresponding parts must be deleted also.
• #24: This slide continues the discussion about designing databases. One technique database designers use in modeling the structure of the data is to use an entity-relationship diagram (illustrated on the next slide). Symbols on the diagram illustrate the types of relationships between entities. Ask students what different types of relationships there are between entities (one-to-one, one-to-many, many-to-many).
• #25: This graphic shows an example of an entity-relationship diagram. It shows that one ORDER can contain many LINE_ITEMs. (A PART can be ordered many times and appear many times as a line item in a single order.) Each LINE ITEM can contain only one PART. Each PART can have only one SUPPLIER, but many PARTs can be provided by the same SUPPLIER.
• #26: This slide discusses how very large databases are used to produce valuable information for firms. The text gives the example of how, by analyzing data from customer credit card purchases, Louise’s Trattoria, a Los Angeles restaurant chain, learned that quality was more important than price for most of its customers, who were college educated and liked fine wine. The chain responded to this information by introducing vegetarian dishes, more seafood selections, and more expensive wines, raising sales by more than 10%.
• #27: Business intelligence is a very amorphous notion that is not well defined. In this course we refer instead to a “business intelligence” environment which is composed of many different components (including both technology and management dimensions).
• #28: This slide discusses the use of data warehouses and data marts by firms. Ask students why having a data warehouse is an advantage for firms hoping to perform business analyses on the data? Why does there have to be a repository of data that is separate from the transaction database?
• #29: This graphic illustrates the components of a data warehouse system. It shows that the data warehouse extracts data from multiple sources, both internal and external, including a Hadoop cluster, and transforms it as needed for the data warehouse systems. An analytic platform has tools for power users, including reporting, OLAP, and data mining, to extract meaningful information from the data warehouse and Hadoop cluster. A subset of the data warehouse is collected in a data mart for casual groups of users.
• #33: This slide illustrates the role and types of analytical tools and techniques for finding useful information and relationships in large data sets.
• #34: This slide discusses online analytical processing, one of the three principle tools for gathering business intelligence. Ask students to come up with additional examples of what a multidimensional query might be.
• #35: This graphic illustrates the concept of dimensions as it relates to data. Product is one dimension. East is a dimension, and projected and actual sales are two more dimensions. Altogether, we are trying to analyze four dimensions. The business question is: In the Eastern region, what are the actual and projected sales of our products (nuts, bolts, washers, and screws)? Sometimes referred to as a “data cube,” the graphic can depict this four dimensional view of the data. More importantly, when compared to a spreadsheet model of the same data, a graphical data cube is much faster, easier to understand and visualize the relationships.
• #36: This slide discusses another business intelligence tool driven by databases, data mining. Data mining provides insights into data that cannot be discovered through OLAP, by inferring rules from patterns in data. Ask students to describe the types of information listed: Associations: Occurrences linked to single event Sequences: Events linked over time Classification: Recognizes patterns that describe group to which item belongs Clustering: Similar to classification when no groups have been defined; finds groupings within data Forecasting: Uses series of existing values to forecast what other values will be
• #37: Whereas data mining describes analysis of data in databases, there are other types of information that can be “mined,” such as text mining and Web mining. Ask students what other types of unstructured textual data sets a company might store, and what kind of useful information might be extracted from them.
• #38: This slide continues the exploration of mining stored data for valuable information. In addition to text mining, there are several ways to mine information on the Web. The text uses the example of marketers using Google Trends and Google Insights for Search services, which track the popularity of various words and phrases used in Google search queries, to learn what people are interested in and what they are interested in buying. What type of Web mining is this? Why might a marketer be interested in the number of Web pages that link to a site?
• #39: This slide looks at how companies utilize the Web to access company databases. Ask students to describe the flow of information from a company’s databases to the Web page a user is accessing data on. Why is browser software easy to use? Why is it less expensive to add a Web interface to a database-driven information system?
• #40: This graphic illustrates the way data is passed from a database through to a user with a Web browser. Ask students to describe what types of data transformation occur between the various appliances, for example, what happens to data as it flows from the database to the database server? Answer: data in the database is stored using the data format required by the database software. This formatted data needs to be transformed into an XML format for presentation on the Web. The database server makes this transformation and passes it along to the application server which uses it to populate (or construct) an HTML Web page. The Web page is then sent to the Web server which sends it over the Internet as an HTML Web page, which is finally displayed on the users screen. Although each of these software functions is represented by a separate computer in the illustration, in fact all these servers can and often do reside on a single computer as software.
• #41: This slide discusses the firm’s need for an information policy in order to ensure that firm data is accurate, reliable, and readily available. Note that although the database administration group establishes and creates the physical database, the data administration function is responsible for logical database design and data dictionary development. Why would this function be better placed with the data administration group?
• #42: This slide discusses the importance of data quality. Ask students for personal examples of what happens when a company’s data is faulty. The text provides an example of one study finding that 10 to 25 percent of customer and prospect records contain critical data errors. Has anyone in class directly experienced a problem with the accuracy of data about them stored on computer systems?
• #43: This slide continues the discussion of data quality and examines ways to improve the firm’s data quality. Ask students what types of data quality problems there are (data that is incomplete, inaccurate, improperly formatted, redundant). Ask students if user perceptions of quality are as important as statistical evidence of data quality problems. What is another word for data cleansing?