Case Example: Acme Industrial Online Corporate Library

To provide a frame of reference to show the concepts and syntax of SQL for use by Texis, we will use the example of Acme Industrial's Online Corporate Library. It is the job of the corporate librarian to make selectively accessible to Management, Personnel, Marketing, and Research & Development (R&D), the full text content of management, personnel, marketing, and R&D reports, both in tabulated and full text form.

Many entities and their related functions are involved. While a researcher in R&D requires a conceptual search and full text study of all work that has been done similar to her own project, the Technology Manager may be interested in hours spent by which staff, on what projects, and to what final results in encapsulated form. The Marketing Director will want to keep track of finished reports on subjects of interest, while having access to promotional budget information to plan the focus of the ad campaign over the next two quarters.

The Corporate Librarian must be able to supply concise short form and expanded long form information on demand to those who request it, while maintaining discretionary security. Therefore a mix of fielded and full text information must be available and easy to manipulate and turn into generated report content.

It may even be that each department wishes to create their own front end application program which defines the way in which they conduct their daily business while accessing this information. But where the information is shared, the online library database is common to each and must be managed as such.

All the daily activities of Acme Industrial create the need for recording and storing vast amounts of data. These activities affect the Online Corporate Library System in numerous ways. Data concerning transactions and daily events must be captured in order to keep the data in the system accurate. The system must have the capability to answer unplanned, one-time-only queries in addition to preplanned queries.

Texis is the SQL Relational Database Server which has the horsepower to manage this main repository of information.

This introductory chapter has introduced you to several concepts and terms related to relational database management systems. In addition we have provided the background case of Acme Industrial's Online Corporate Library System that will be used in examples throughout the text. In the next chapter you will learn how to define and remove tables for use by Texis.