Tag: Tutorial
A look at algorithms used in RDBMS implementations of DWH systems
When you’re using a data warehouse, some actions get repeated over and over. We will take a look at four common algorithms used to deal with these situations. Most DWH (data warehouse) systems today are on a RDBMS (relational database management system) platform. These databases (Oracle, DB2, or Microsoft SQL Server) are widely used, easy to work with, and mature – a very important thing to bear in mind when choosing a platform.
A Database Model for a MOOC Platform
If you ran a MOOC online learning platform like edX or Coursera, how would you keep it organized? In this article, we’ll look at a database model that would do the job.
You’ve probably heard of MOOC (Massive Open Online Course), a trending way to learn online. And if you haven’t, think of a MOOC program as university subjects with all materials, tests, and feedback available online. Two of the most popular online MOOC providers are Coursera (founded by Stanford University) and edX (founded by Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University).
A Database Model for a Taxi Service
Call them taxis or cabs, these convenient rides for rent have been around for centuries. Nowadays, it’s a lot more complicated to run a taxi service. In this article, we’ll look at a database model designed to meet the needs of a cab company.
The history of “calling a cab” began in 17th century London. In most places, cabs are more affordable than ever. They are also becoming a lot more accessible: we can order a taxi by phone, via mobile applications, or on the Web.
Again and Again! Managing Recurring Events In a Data Model
A recurring event, by definition, is an event that recurs at an interval; it’s also called a periodic event. There are many applications which allow their users to setup recurring events. How does a database system manage recurring events? In this article, we’ll explore one way that they are handled.
Recurrence is not easy for applications to deal with. It can become a hurricane task, especially when it comes to covering every possible recurring scenario – including creating bi-weekly or quarterly events or allowing the rescheduling of all future event instances.
Serving Delicious Food (and Data) – A Data Model for Restaurants
What part does database design play in running a restaurant? What might the data model for a restaurant database look like? Find out in this article.
A restaurant serves people with ready-made food. This is a type of business that is thriving all over the world, and often with a lot of flare. People feel very comfortable going to restaurants, and they are starting to expect a wide range of options when it comes to their next meal.
Viewing Holidays With Data Modeler’s Eyes
Celebration!! Family time!! Long drive!! A day at the beach!! All these words buzz into our minds when we think of holidays. Have you ever considered how a multinational company keeps track of holidays across the globe? There must be a data dictionary to maintain all these details so that they can ensure seamless business with their local partners.
This article will explain such a data model.
The Project Requirements in a Nutshell I have quite simple and straightforward requirements this time.
Creating a Data Model for Carpooling
Nowadays, carpooling is accepted and promoted by people around the globe. It certainly reduces one’s personal carbon footprint, and it can be more cost-effective than renting or buying a car.
Carpooling also takes a lot of work – organizational work that can readily be done by a well-designed database. This article explains a detailed data model that a carpooling website could use.
Data Design, Meet Carpooling So, we need to design a data model for a ride-share (aka carpooling) website.
Problem Set 2 – Identifying Entities and Attributes
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In an earlier article on data modeling we promised to give you a set of exercises to practice finding entities and attributes. Here is the second installment of our problem set. Enjoy.
Problem 1: Countries Description: Find the right entities and their attributes to represent all the countries in the world, their interior regions (which can be called states, provinces, or regions) and their cities.
Renting out Cars Is as Simple as Driving: A Data Model for a Car Rental Company
You might have rented a car on your last vacation. You reserved your car online, and then picked it up from its designated location after paying all the previously-agreed charges. Once you were done, you returned it to the agency and perhaps paid some additional fees. Did you ever think about the system that makes all these things happen? In this article, we’ll look at a data model for a car rental system.
Problem Set 1 – Identifying Entities
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In an earlier article on data modeling we promised to give you a set of exercises to practice finding entities. Well, here they are. Have fun!
Problem 1: Language School Mr. Trotter, the proprietor of a rapidly-growing language school, wants to introduce a new system in his company.
Database Modeling
I wrote a song about dental floss but did anyone’s teeth get cleaner?
Frank Zappa
When we think of the dental office, our first associations are the drill, the pain, and the fear. OK, that sounds bad. Besides taking care of teeth, a dentist has many other obligations that are professional, legal, or both. All of them require proper data management.
To meet this documentation requirement, many dental and medical offices use paper records.
How Does Database Design Help Organize Teachers, Lessons, and Students?
An investment in knowledge pays the best interest.
Benjamin Franklin
In the modern world, education is omnipresent. Now more than ever before, it plays an important role in our society. It’s so important, in fact, that many of us continue our education well after finishing school or college. We have all heard of lifelong learning, non-formal education, and workshops for all ages. These methods differ from formal education in many ways, but they also have things in common.
Vertabelo Advent Calendar
From today until Christmas Eve, we’re going to publish some tips & tricks for Vertabelo. Check our blog every day for a new one!
List of all available tips: How to move a column up or down Use keyboard shortcuts in Vertabelo! How to copy tables between models How to make a column unique How to quote table names in generated SQL script How to create a multicolumn primary key How to include comments in SQL script How to name a primary key How to create multiple references between two tables How to use a data type that isn’t listed in the data types panel Vertabelo reports that my data type is not supported.
Database Modeling Course (2)
You’re finally ready to get down to real data modeling. We’ll start off with entities and their attributes. Entities are the basic building block of every data model. In this post, you’ll find out what they are and how to identify them.
What Is an Entity? What is a Specific Instance of an Entity? Data models help us to identify what kind of information we’ll store in our system. We use such models to address the question What will the data in our system be about?
Database Model for a Messaging System
People love to communicate. We often joke that any software system always evolves into a messaging system. This article will explain the system requirements and step by step approach to design a data model for a messaging system.
Requirements in Nutshell The core functionality of a messaging system in an application is to send notifications/messages to a user or a set of users. Our system also allows one to send messages to a user group.
Database Modeling Course (1)
Data modeling is an essential step in the process of creating any complex software. It helps developers understand the domain and organize their work accordingly. In this article, which begins a new series devoted to database modeling, we’ll try to convince you why you should include it in your projects and what it looks like.
Do I Really Need Data Modeling? As a novice developer, you often start your programming adventure with simple applications like the sieve of Eratosthenes or enumerating the Fibonacci sequence.
Modeling a Database for Recording Sales. Part 1
Storing sales data properly and later combining it can lead to creating a predictive model with a high rate of accuracy. In this and the next few articles we’ll analyze a database design for recording sales.
Everyone lives by selling something.
Robert Louis Stevenson
In today’s world, selling products is ubiquitous. And salespeople who have access to robust tools that leverage historical data to analyze trends and enable an enterprise to adjust business strategies accordingly have an advantage over their competitors.
Tackling Your Troubles – Building a Bug and Problem Database
Death and taxes – add “software problems” to that list of the inevitable. There is always a new issue, a new failure, a new key opportunity that an organization must address. And to avoid repeating the problems, or to revise your prior fixes, it is critical to capture the problems accurately and completely. You need a history of what happened and when. In this piece, we create the logical model for a problem or “bug” reporting system.
Defining Identifying and Non-Identifying Relationships in Vertabelo
Various data modeling tools allow modelers to define relationships in a data-model as identifying or non-identifying. We can define a relationship as identifying or non-identifying in Vertabelo as well. This article will explain the way to do so.
Introduction Before moving ahead with the article, I’d like to explain what identifying or non-identifying mean.
Let’s take a real time example of a book storing system. In the system, a book belongs to an owner, and an owner can own multiple books.
Database Model for a Driving School’s Reservation System. Part 2
Let’s build further changes into the data model, which I created in my earlier blog post, such as having an automated approach to assigning an instructor and vehicle to a lesson, invoicing to customers and tracking of them.
First off, I need to build logic on the application side to assign an instructor and vehicle to lessons before they actually take place. The main thing to ensure here is availability, i.
How to Keep Track of What the Users Do
In several of the projects we have worked on, customers have asked us to log more user actions in the database. They want to know all of the actions the users perform in the application, but capturing and recording all human interactions can be challenging. We had to log all modifications of data performed via the system. This article describes some of the pitfalls we encountered and the approaches that we used to overcome them.
Designing a Data Model for a Hotel Room Booking System
It’s common knowledge that the best way to learn something is to practice it in a real-life scenario. Obviously, the same applies to database modeling. Therefore, in this article I decided to teach you how to create a simple database structure, taking a textbook example of a hotel room reservation system. I will show you how to get started and give you some ideas for extending the model.
Database Model for a Driving School’s Reservation System. Part 1
I need to design a data model for a reservation system for a driving school. The subject area looks quite straightforward, but complexities are still involved. You have to track all requests from clients and keep track of resources (vehicle, time and instructor) consumed during lessons.
Introduction I like to use a domain driven approach for designing a data model. It makes me put technology obsession aside and concentrate primarily on modeling the subject area revolving around its associated entities and relationships amongst themselves.
How to Design a Database Model for a Movie Theater Reservation System
Do you like going to the movies? Have you ever considered what the database design behind their reservation system looks like? In this article we’ll prepare an example database model for a movie theater.
There are a few assumptions we have to bear in mind: contemporary multiplex movie theaters can have one or more auditoriums within a larger complex, each auditorium can have a different number of seats, seats are numerated with row number and seat position within a row, a movie can have multiple screenings at different times, or it can be screened simultaneously in a different auditorium, for each screening a seat can be reserved/sold only once, we want to track who entered each reservation/sale into the system.
Adding More Advanced Features Like Managing Categories and Voting on Threads and Posts
In my second article about an online forum, I mentioned that there might be several more advanced features to be added:
Forum categories and sub-categories where each category has a subject, several moderators and additional information like creation date of the category. A post might have a subject in addition to the content. We might want to allow users to vote up and vote down on threads and posts.
Making a More Advanced Model With User, Thread, and Post Statuses
In my first article about an online forum, I mentioned that there might be several more advanced features to add:
More formal details about the user instead of a single “name” field. You may want the user’s first name, last name and username or nickname. A nice forum would also allow users to have a profile picture, email, roles, status (to allow users to be blocked), and other information like when they last visited the forum.
How to Convert a Data Model Between Two Database Management Systems
Even though Vertabelo doesn’t provide a direct conversion of a data model from one database engine to another, this can be easily done in a few simple steps.
The user’s question
We’ve been developing a web application for a while. Initially, we wanted to use MySQL for our database but finally we decided to choose Postgres. Unfortunately, the entire data model was created for MySQL. How can we quickly migrate it to the new database type?
A Database Model for an Online Survey. Part 4
In this final article in a four-part series, I complete the design for an online survey database to provide flexibility for multiple surveys, question re-use, multiple choice answers, ordering of questions, conditional jumps in the survey based on responses, and control over the users’ access to surveys via groups of survey owners.
Introduction In the conclusion to Part 3 of this series of articles, I mentioned that I would be adding more advanced features in this article.
New Features in Vertabelo Released in April 2015
Tell us what you want!
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A Database Model for an Online Survey. Part 3
In the conclusion to Part 2 of this series of articles, I mentioned that I would be adding more advanced features, such as:
Conditional ordering of questions in a survey or, in other words, the possibility for a conditional path through the survey Administration of the survey Reports and analytics In this third article related to an online survey, I will extend the functionality to support conditional ordering of questions.
Designing & Deploying a PostgreSQL Database in the Cloud
Our users sometimes say to us: “Vertabelo is awesome but... how can I add the data?” Oh, come on! Vertabelo is not a database engine or a database administration tool. At least not at the moment. For now, Vertabelo is intended mainly to design database models. This doesn't mean that we don’t care about what you can do next with models created in our application. Of course, we do! That’s why we provide our users with some useful tools on our website and in our GitHub repository.
A Database Model for an Online Survey. Part 2
In part 1 of this article series, we discussed a basic design for an online survey. In the conclusion to that article, I mentioned part 2 would cover more advanced features for our survey such as: Different types of questions such as multiple choice questions Conditional order of questions in a survey or, in other words, the possibility for a conditional path through the survey Administration of the surveys Reports and analytics Let’s start by extending the functionality to support different types of questions.
A Database Model for an Online Survey. Part 1
I need to create the design for a new database which will be the data layer for an application; the application will be an online survey or polling like Survey Monkey. My challenge is that the functionality that I require is not supported by existing survey sites, so I need to build my own. What I need is a conditional survey (if the answer to question 4 is “yes,” then we ask question 5 and skip question 6; but if the answer to question 4 is “no,” then we skip question 5 and ask question 6).
Modeling a Basic Data Structure to Manage Users, Threads, and Posts
An online discussion forum is a site where people can hold conversations in the form of posted messages. Discussion forums allow conversations to take place when people are not on-line, and messages may be temporarily archived. Also, depending on the forum set-up, a message might need to be approved by a moderator before it becomes visible to other users. Forums have a specific set of terms, for example, a single conversation is generally referred to as a “thread”.
Now You Can Print a Diagram
We hadn’t planned on adding a feature to print diagrams. Our original idea was that Vertabelo would supersede paper diagrams. Nevertheless, some of our users pointed out that they rely heavily on printouts (Export to PDF topic). So, I’d like to announce a new feature called “Export to PDF” also known as “Printing.”
Note that exporting a database model to a PDF file is available for Premium and Team account plans only (see the comparison of the plans’ features in our Pricing).
Database Design 101
In this video you will learn how to start creating your database model. You will find out why nouns are important and how you should handle them when creating a database model.
If you want to learn more, read our beginner tutorial on how to create a database model.
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How to Create a Database Model From Scratch
So you want to create your first database model but you don’t know how to start? Read on!
I assume you already know a little about tables, columns, and relationships. If you don’t, watch our video tutorials before you continue.
Start With a System Description You should always start creating a database model with a description of a system. In a classroom situation, a system description is given to you by a teacher.
Database Design 101
In this video tutorial you will learn about references – how to create a relationship between the tables, how it affects their structure, and how it looks in the data.
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Database Design 101
Vertabelo presents part 2 of our Database Design 101 series that brings you easy-to-understand introduction to databases. This time we will focus on table columns and most commonly used data types.
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Database Design 101
Welcome to our new Database Design 101 series that brings you an easy-to-understand introduction to databases. Let’s begin with answering the question what a database is and how data is stored in databases.
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Database Design 101
A good data modeling exercise for beginners is to create a data model of an online store. Every time I give this exercise to my students, I’m surprised at how difficult it is for them.
Find the Concepts... Let’s see how it can be done. We know we have to create a table for every concept in the domain. Think about the nouns and noun phrases you would use to describe the domain.
