Database Administrator for Department Store Scenario

The department store has expanded in the local region by opening five more bookstores, and the bookstore has launched a series of marketing campaign to increase sales and attract new customers. The objective of this technical report is to develop a plan to create and maintain an enterprise-wide database system that will assist the bookstore to hold the inventory and sales data. The database design will assist the organization to support the new marketing strategy, and align with the product initiatives.

Identification of the Potential Departmental and Sales Transaction to be Store within the Database

In the United States, the enterprise-wide relational database is very critical for the retail bookstore envisaging increasing sales within the contemporary business environment. To design a database to support the accuracy of the business information for the departmental store, there is a need to identify the potential sales transaction. This identification will avoid the redundant data within the enterprise relational database. The principal entities involved in the departmental and sales transactions for the bookstore are as follows:

Customers- They are the people who buy the product from the bookstore. The main attributes for customer's identifications are name, identification number, and address.

Customer History- attributes to identify customer's history are date of delivery, history identification number, and quantity delivered.

Publishers -- These companies supply book stocks to the stores. Main attributes are name, publisher identification number, address, and contact number.

Book- These are the product supplied to the bookstore and which are available for purchase. Main attributes are the ISBN, author, title, and price, amount in the inventory, subject area, and year of publication.

Store -- This is the location or actual premises where the transaction takes place.

Employees -- staff who work in the store and deal with the customers.

Transaction: Process of buying and selling of book product. Main attributes for identification are transaction number, number of books bought and sold, and the amount of money involved in the transaction.

All these makes up of the entities in the database design, and each entity has attributes allotted to them. The table below reveals the attributes for each entity.

Entity

Attribute

Customer

Customer ID

First Name

Last Name

Address

APT

City

Zip

Email

Book

Book ID

Book Number

ISBN

Publication Date

Publisher Name

Type

Price

Quantity

Employee

Employee ID

First Name

Last Name

Address

APT

City

Zip

Email

Hire Date

Term Date

Term Note

Book Author

Author ID

First Name

Last Name

Address

APT

City

Zip

Email

Date of Birth

Order Transaction

Price

Quantity

Total Price

Ship Date

Ship Type

Customer ID

Employee ID

Book ID

Sales

Products

Customer

Employee

Store

Store

Store Name

Address

Publisher

Publisher ID

Address

APT

City

Zip

Email

Web Address

All these attributes provide the information for the successful transactions in the departmental bookstore. The next step is to present the business rules associated with the business transactions as well the storage in the database. Bookstore transaction is similar to the business transaction; however, the department store will organize and store data to facilitate easy transaction.

2. Database Solution and Business Rules for the Sales Transaction

A business rule is a statement that imposes a form of constraint on an aspect of database. The business rules assist the organization to conduct business transactions effectively, and businesses rules provide business solutions for the database. The business rules are important for the database because they provide important method of data modification as well as the method data are created and deleted. The rules assist in determining the structure of the database. The proposed database provides the following business rules for the database design:

Rule 1:

When a customer order a book from the bookstore, the following business process must take place:

An order received from a customer.

An employee checks the inventory for product availability,

Employee confirms the customer's order,

The employees contacts warehouse,

The bookstore ships the product and invoice to the customer.

Rule 2

Department store has 5 stores that sell many books, and this is translated into a field constraint within the dataset. The designated code is also assigned to each store location. In the field, the assigned codes are valid.

Rule 3

A customer is allowed to generate many invoices,

Each invoice could be generated by one customer,

An invoice should contain one or more line, and each line associates with one invoice,

Publisher is allowed to supply many books,

Rule 4:

Each vendor is allowed to supply at least one product. This is represented by the relationship constraint within the database.

3. Evaluation of all Relationships...

The next section arrives at the accurate relationship of the entities revealing 35 relationships where each entity has 5 relationships.
1. Customers ( Sales: 1 customer can buy books as many times as he wishes.

2. Sales ( Customers: 1 or more sale is made from customer

3. Customers ( Book: 1 customer can purchase multiple books

4. Books (Customers: 1 book can be purchased by multiple customers

5. Customers ( Stores: 1 customer can purchase a book from multiple shops

6. Stores ( Customers: 1 store can provide services to multiple customers

7. Stores ( Books: 1 store can sell books to multiple customer

8. Books ( Stores: 1 books can be sold in multiple stores

9. Stores ( Sales: 1 store can make multiple sales

10. Sales ( Stores: 1 store can make 1 sale at the same time

11. Books ( Sales: 1 book can be purchased in multiple sales

12. Sales ( Books: 1 sale can be made out of multiple times

13. Customers ( Employees: 1 customer can only be served by 1 customer

14. Employees ( Customers: 1 employee can serve only 1 customer

15. Stores ( Employees: 1 store can occupy multiple employees

16. Employees ( Stores: 1 employee can serve in multiple stores

17. Publisher ( Customers: 1 publisher may be requested by multiple customers

18. Customers ( Publisher: 1 customer can request multiple publishers

19. Books ( Publisher: 1 book may be supplied by 1 publisher

20. Publisher ( Books: 1 publisher can supply multiple books

21. Sales ( Publishers: 1 sale can be made from multiple publishers

22. Publishers ( Sales: 1 publisher can supply multiple sales

23. Stores ( Publishers: 1 store can provide stock to multiple publishers

24. Publisher ( Stores: 1 publisher can supply stocks to multiple stores

25. Employees ( Publisher: 1 employee can serve multiple publishers

26. Publisher ( Employees: 1 publisher can be occupied by multiple employees

27. Employee ( Sales: 1 employee can make 1 sale

28. Employee ( Sales: 1 employee can make multiple sales

29. Books ( Employees: 1 book can be sold by multiple employees

30. Employees ( Books: 1 employee can sell multiple books.

31. Employee --> Book Author: 1 employee can order from 1 book author.

32. Book Author. --> Employees: 1 book author can supply book to many employees

33. Store --> Order Transaction: 1 store can make multiple order transactions.

34. Order Transaction -->Store: 1 order transaction can occur in one store.

35. Employee --> order Transaction: 1 employee can be in charge of 1 order transaction at a time.

Overview of all the relationships reveals that there are 35 relationships based on 7 entities multiply by 5 relationships. The next step is to provide the cardinality of each relationship and the annotated diagram of each relationship. Each cardinality relationship takes the following form:

One-to-One (1:1)

One-to-many (1: M)

Many-to-Many (M:N)

Many-to-One (M: 1)

Customers --> Sales; --> 1: N

Customers --> Books; --> M: N

Customers --> Stores; --> M: N

Sales --> Books; --> M: N

Stores --> Sales; --> 1: N

Stores --> Books; --> M: N

These relationships are shown in the Entity-Relation Diagram in the Fig 1.

Fig 1: Entity-Relation Diagram for the Department Store

4. Best Practices to use Databases for Retaining Customers and Increasing Sales

a. Use of Big Data tools for forecasting sales and inventory in the Department Store.

In the contemporary business environment, data are interwoven in the department store and critical to organizational performances. Similar to human capital and hard assets, data are essential tools that enhance organizational competitive advantages. The Big Data, which refers to the large pool of data brought together has been the useful tool that enhances decision-making. Typically, the big data can assist department store to forecast sales and inventory useful to reduce waste and increase quality of product and services.

The Big Data is very useful to segment and target potential customer. For example, Big Data tool is very useful to identify customers who are nearing purchasing decision, making the Big Data to be useful tool to enhance competitive advantages and growth for the department store. Typically, The Big Data tool is very useful to store an unlimited amount of information about the customer preference, and the Big Data is a predictive model to accurately predict customer's behaviors. Thus, department store could use Big Data to store large pool of data about the past sales in order to forecast the future sales.

Moreover, department store can use the Big Data tool to understand the customer preference based on the past data, the data collected could assist department stores to forecast the particular inventory to store and discard. Using the Big Data tool accurately, the department store could be able to maintain the inventory that customer require at all time in the year.

b. Two (2) SQL Stored Procedures for Predictive Analytics

Couple with the Big Data tool, the SQL procedure assists sales associates in the predictive analytics. A departmental store…