Studio 2: Part 1

What tools did you use?
We used microsoft access to do the databasing, and used visio to model the design.


Was it a difficult task? What parts of the task were difficult and what were easy?
This was a really quite difficult task, figuring out what needed to be in seperate tables was pretty difficult to get third normal form. It's been about a year since i did any of this stuff in great detail so i was difficult to get my mind in to gear. I'm used to making these diagrams from the ground up.
Another difficulty was trying to get all the data across from the old database, there didn't seem to be a nice way of doing it. There were reverse engineering tools in visio and vp but unfortunetly vp only had it in the fancy edition and visio needed the data to be re-entered anyway. It was pretty easy doing the relationships though, that was really easy to do in access. There is no functionality that i found to do joint primary keying, which is a major shortfall.

Was it a realistic task? What was realistic about it, what wasn't?
It is a real task. This actually needs to be done in business, and we could do it. Slightly unrealistic to be able to do it very quickly it took myself and Luke Pocock the whole of the 3 hour studio to do it.

here's the database file if u want it
We designed it to have alot of tables as u can see in the above picture. We were trying to achieve third normal form, which i think we reached. We tried to get all the repeating groups in to seperate tables. i think we went a bit overboard, but oh well.