Birchwood Lane School Database Proposal for System of Record 1

Birchwood Lane School Database Proposal for System of Record

Stephen McFarlane

Southern New Hampshire University

IT 204 Introduction to Data and Info Management

Birchwood Lane School Database Proposal for System of Record 2

Birchwood Lane School Database Proposal for System of Record

Background Information

Birchwood Lane Schools need to upgrade their current process for keeping a system of record, to

meet state and federal requirements. The current records are recorded on paper and filed away.

This currently makes it harder to maintain organized data, slows down the time it takes to look

up information. It also limits the number of people who can look at data and is very time

consuming.

Project Objective

The objective of this project, is to create a new system of record that meets or exceeds they state

and federal requirements. This can be done, by creating a web application with a database in the

backend to store the data. This will make it easy to organize, add new data, find old data and

expand the application if needed in the future. This should save time and money for the staff and

the school, by increasing the efficiency of the administrators and instructors. The system needs to

be able to store data for students, courses and instructors and their relationships with each other.

Proposed Solution

The solution would be to would be to build a database (probably with MySQL) that can hold all

the data you need along with the relationships the data has. This will allow the system to be

efficient and scalable. The solution would be made up of tables using RDBMS. We would store

the student, instructors and courses in their own table. We would then have a set of relationships,

which would include:

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StudentCourses table which would allow the student id from the student table to be linked

to the course id from the course table. The combination of student id and course id would

be unique in that table, but students could have more than one course they are enrolled in

and a course can have more than 1 student.

InstructorCourses table would allow the instructor id from the instructor table to be

linked to the course id from the course table. This combination of instructor id and course

id would be unique in that table. Instructors could teach more than one course and the

course could be taught by different instructors.

StudentAddress table would contain the student id and the fields needed for the full

address (street address, city, state and zip code). All 5 of these columns would make the

row unique allowing a student to have multiple addresses. These address fields would be

used to present the full address in the application.

InstructorAddress table would contain the instructor id and the fields needed for the full

address (street address, city, state and zip code). All 5 of these columns would make the

row unique allowing an instructor to have multiple addresses. These address fields would

be used to present the full address in the application.

Implementation Plan

To actually implement this, we will create the database based on the design we have created.

There will be a web application on the front end that you can used to access and input the data.

We will need to train the employees who will be using this and help them to get up to speed and

show them how it will help make things better for them. The creation of the database and the

procedures needed for the application would need probably 1 week for the database and 1 week
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of testing and performance tuning. Depending on budget and the amount active users we will be

picking from 1 of 3 database choices.

1. Oracle

2. MySQL

3. Microsoft SQL Server.

Questions

I do have some additional questions to help me finalize the plans.

1. What is the budget for hardware and software?

2. How many users might access the system at a given time?

3. Do you think you might want to expand this to hold things like grades or other data

(assignment or assessment data)?

4. What is the timeframe for the project to be implemented?

5. What is the experience level of the IT staff who will interact with the new system?

a. Do they have a good amount of database knowledge?

6. Have you looked at a Student Information System that is already created by another

company?

a. Stars Campus Solution It has LMS powered by Moodle, Instructor Grade Book,

Student Academic Record Keeping, Student Portal and many other features.

b. PraxiSchool It has lots of features but keeps track to students, staff and classes.

Has lots of reporting features, student parent portal.

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References

MySQL. (2016). Retrieve from http://www.mysql.com/products/

Microsoft SQL Server. (2016). Retrieved from https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/sql-server/sql-

server-editions

Oracle. (2016). Retrieved from https://www.oracle.com/database/enterprise-edition/features.html

Stars Campus Solution (2016). Retrieved from http://starscampus.com/features/

PraxiSchool. (2016). Retrieved from http://www.praxipower.com/index.php#.WDFUS_orJPY