Top-Down and Bottom-Up Approaches to Modelling the Database
- Justification for starting with a diagram instead of the database software.
The process of coming up with diagrams which are referred to as entity relationship diagrams is called entity relationship modelling and a stage in database design that is done prior to the actual database implementation is a database management software (DBMS). According to good database design standards the first step to designing a database is to model the database using either top-down approach or bottom-up approach. Use of top-down approach is the approach that designs the database using entity relationship diagrams while bottom-up approach uses normalization to get the entities from the business rules. These two approaches are used interchangeably to help the database designer to understand the database comprehensively thus making sure that all entities, their attributes and the relationships between the entities are captured. Modelling the database before doing the actual implementation makes the implementation process easy since everything about the database is already stated thus the developer only has to make the tables based on the entities and the relationships achieved during the modelling process. This helps save time and avoid errors which could lender the database ineffective because of errors that could have been captured during the design stage of the database development.
- Legal issues resulting from saving of credit card details and how they could be solved
With the current and expected growth of the partykids business, the business will have to start recording details of credit cards for customers who pay for their booking using credit cards. This will help the business by making the payment process easy as all the information about a customer is already in the database thus more orders will be processed and at a higher rate. Storing customer’s credit card details can bring legal issues to the business because is the information is accessed by malicious users like hackers, the information could be used to defraud the customers and this would be blamed on the business as it is supposed to make sure the customer’s information is safe from all risks. There have been many cases where companies have gone broke because their private information has been accessed by hackers.
To prevent access of this confidential information, partykids will have to make sure that the database is deployed in a very secure environment that is not easy for hackers or malicious users to access. Apart from the secure deployment environment, the business should make sure that the information is stored in an encrypted format that is not easy to decrypt if the malicious users are able to bypass the secure environment.