You will be working on a course project which is a database that you create and maintain. This gives you the opportunity to apply the skills you learn to a real-world situation. For your project, you are a consultant working for Half-Eagle Rarities, an auction house specializing in rare coins from around the world. Like every other business, Half-Eagle Rarities wants to get on the Internet and establish a niche in the world of online commerce. Your client has just purchased a software package designed to manage coin auctions over the Internet using a Web-based
interface. Your mission is to set up and create the database to support that software. The logical design already exists, and looks like this:
Your job is to create the database, create the tables to match the design shown above, and work with the systems integrators to make minor changes as they customize the software. As we proceed, you will build this database incrementally through project-related exercises. Your project will begin as soon as you start learning the tasks involved.
Some of the real-world aspects that apply to this project scenario are:
There really is a company, Teletrade™, that conducts coin auctions online.
The design includes one potentially frequently used table. This is the bid table, and it will likely sustain a high volume of inserts while auctions are taking place. Insert performance on this table will be critical to the success of the application.
Referential integrity needs to be enforced.
There is a many-to-many relationship between the Lot and Coin tables. This has been resolved into two one-to-many relationships through the use of the Coins_in_Lot table.
The previous lesson included a link to a ZIP file that contains scripts that automatically create the database and user schema to support this database. This course also provides the steps to build scripts that will create the tables, constraints, and indexes in this database.