CSC 240: The Week beginning Aug. 30

Due Sept. 8

  • Monday:
    Course Syllabus
    Introduction to databases

  • Wednesday:
    We brainstormed about the data involved in purchasing items online (e.g. item name, description, price, size, shipping cost, etc.). We then discussed that to store the data, each piece of data should have a type (e.g. integer, decimal, real, text/string, memo, etc.). We started organizing the data into entities such as Item and Transaction. We considered relationships between entities for instance item(s) were ordered in a transaction. We started discussing kinds of relationships: since a transaction could contain many items and a given item may be part of many transactions -- this particular relationship is referred to as "many-to-many." We started to consider implementing the database by considering what the tables should look like. Some of the data belonged to an Item table, some belonged to a Transaction table, and other data belonged to an ItemInTransaction table that was necessary to realize the "many-to-many" relationship. We also saw the need to introduction ID fields to serve as "keys."

  • Friday:
    Introduction to Access