CSC20002: The IDEA home Furnishings Company to Design and Implement a Database-driven Website to meet the Company’s Requirements: Database Systems Assignment, UK

Background Information and Requirements

The IDEA home furniture company (a fictitious company) maintains a large database of home furnishing products, such as furniture, carpets, lamps, rugs, etc., which are bought by its customers. Due to the difference in the size of the products that they sell, products are either for delivery or collection in the store. All products have a price and a description along with other details, whilst if an item is for delivery then the company needs to hold the dimensions of the product (for calculating postage costs) and for items for collection it holds the weight.

The company has many stores across the country and each store has a number of employees. Certain employees deal with the delivery of products bought online, such as organising and posting, while other employees deal with the products for collection. Customers have unique accounts with the company and the company wants to hold details of past purchases so that they may in the future build up a picture of the items purchased by customers for marketing purposes. The company needs to hold details relating to products purchased online, either for delivery or, if for collection, then it needs to hold details of the collection arrangements with the customer. Each store has a number of suppliers who deliver the products for sale in the store.

Assignment Tasks

Use the background information about the IDEA home furnishings company to design and implement a database-driven Website to meet the company’s requirements. The database must be implemented using Oracle DBMS and PHP as a server-side scripting language. No marks will be given if any other DBMS or server-side scripting languages are used. You may use any scripting language on the client-side in addition to the plain HTML. Specifically, you need to:

1. Identify the main entity types, their relationships, and various constraints or enterprise rules. You should then construct a conceptual Entity Relationship Diagram (ERD) and the corresponding logical ERD for this database system using the extended UML notation (Ref: Lecture notes & Connolly & Begg, 2010). Show all multiplicity constraints clearly and make sure that all the important attributes are represented.

2. Map the ERD constructed in (1) above onto a relational database schema using the Oracle SQL. Define all primary and foreign keys clearly. Normalisation is NOT required for this assignment. You should then use Oracle SQL*Plus to populate the database with sufficient sample records in order to enable various queries to be performed. It is advisable to use a .sql script to save all the statements that are relevant for this exercise not only as proof of your work but also as a means of simplifying debugging or applying changes to the database schema without the need for re-typing the whole set of SQL statements over and over again.

3. Create a neat HTML-based Web interface for retrieving data from the database and displaying it on the Web. Database connectivity should be implemented using the Oracle Call Interface (OCI) functions and SQL queries should be embedded in PHP. Include adequate options for querying the database for specific items and for general browsing.

4. Write a short coherent report (not exceeding 1000 words) summarising the functional requirements of the company, an explanation of your database design and its implementation [Note that the ERD, SQL statements and the PHP code do not give a full explanation]. Finalise your report with a brief appraisal of your application’s features. A URL (and login credentials, if any) for your index Web page should be clearly written in the report.