Exercise: faculty degrees
A number of years ago, I taught evening courses at a small college extension center. The center staff kept a list of faculty members in one of the very early PC-based “database” programs. There was only one faculty table, part of which looked as depicted in the figure below.
No, I’m not making this up. There really were three fields to hold information about degrees that instructors had earned. The data in each degree field looked something like: “MS in Computer Science, 1980, UC Santa Barbara.”
- Determine and describe all the problems with the model given above. Do not try to address the problems, rather, imagine you were required to implement a database with that model and to do data entry on this database. What problems would you encounter?
- Revise the class diagram to correct the problems that you find in this design.
- Draw the relation scheme for your corrected model.
