Data Model

Eden Hall Data Model

It is essential for Eden Hall to have database in order to keep track of their students, faculty, classes, and many other details. It would not be enough for the administration to log data on a spreadsheet because of the collection of records that it keeps on different aspects of Eden Hall. Instead, the administration uses a database to keep track of their data, which is a self-describing collection of integrated records (Kroenke, 2015). In an interview with the Dean of the Falk School of Sustainability, Dr. Peter Walker. During the interview, we learned about the critical data elements that are stored in Eden Hall’s database. With this important information, we were able to construct a data model with its own columns, rows, tables, and primary keys. Since Eden Hall is a satellite campus of Chatham University, in order for administration to avoid an unnecessary repetition of data, they use a subset of the database from the central university’s database. This database is maintained by the enrollment office and registrar.

The first key data element is information on the prospective student. Here, the database keeps track of their name, birthdate, address, interested field of study, as well as their GPA, race, and gender. According to Dr. Walker, keeping track of these data points are essential to achieving the goal of a diverse student body at Eden Hall. The next data element is current student data, where they record the same specific information as the prospective students, but with added details. For example, the database records each grade they have received in every course they have taken, credits, internships completed, published papers or posters, and capstone projects. Information on faculty is the third key data element. This element is comprised of the faculty’s name, birthdate, position, salary, classes they teach, research projects and grants, published papers, university or external committees they have served on,  and board appointments. Another important data element is the information recorded about the sustainability programs. This data consists of the program name, program director, necessary classes and classes offered, the faculty teaching, and number as well as demographics of students enrolled in the program.

In order to make a data model for Eden Hall that consists of the data elements, each key element is made into a table, which is a group of similar rows, also known as records (Kroenke, 2015). These four tables are: prospective students, current students, faculty, and sustainability program. Comprised of these tables are rows and columns. Columns are the characters of the data (bytes) previously mentioned before, such as students names and addresses. Additionally, rows and columns that are grouped together. Here is an example of a table consisting of rows, columns, and bytes:

  Another crucial aspect to maintaining a database is to understand the relationships that groups of data have to other groups of data. One major aspect to comprehending how to prevent data silos is knowing what cardinality is and it’s various forms. Cardinality refers to how many ways a group of data can be split to another group of data. Depicted in the image showing five separate tables, connected by thin, black lines, is where relationships are described. As mentioned previously, there are lines connecting the tables, which shows how tables are linked while also telling the cardinality. Each line is marked with numerals and symbols (1 and ∞). The 1 represents that there is only one piece of this type of data for the relationship, while the ∞ means that there can be many pieces that interact in this relationship. Before analyzing the relationships of the tables presented in the Eden Hall process model, another important item in the visual is the primary key. The primary key indicates that there is a unique value that makes the data easily identifiable and allows for other data to be found using the primary key. The primary key may connect with another primary key from another table, or it may connect with a foreign key, which is value in a table that has the capability to contain data shared between multiple tables. The primary key is indicated with the yellow key icon to the left of the key name.

In the Eden Hall process model, there is no main table which all the rest are connected to, but all are connected indirectly. We are going to start by describing the Program table. The primary key of the Program table is the Program Name value, which also is found in the Course table, and because there is a one to many relationship it states that there can only be one program name for many programs. The Program table also hold data on the Program Director, which is linked to the Faculty table. The Program Director data has a one to one relationship with the Faculty ID primary key because this unique type of data belongs only to the one Program Director. The Faculty ID primary key also has a relationship with the Faculty value of the Course table. This relationship is one to many since Faculty can have only one Faculty ID, but each one Faculty can teach many courses. Now from the Course table’s primary key of Course ID, a relationship is made between the Course’s Course ID and the StudentInClass’s Course ID. This is a one to many relationship as one Course ID can be assigned to the many student enrolled in the class. Now the Student data table also forms a relationship with the StudentInClass table using the Student ID primary key. This relationship has a cardinality of one to many because each student is assigned a unique ID number, but each class can have many students enrolled in it. Using the information on relationships and the cardinality of each from the process model’s data tables, the sharing of information in the database is more homogenous and reliable.

Here is the link to download the database model with the relational schema and table mentioned in this post

Works Cited

Kroenke, D. (2015). MIS Essentials, 4th ed. Washington, D.C.: Pearson.