Part A
Scenario:
Muscat Agro Products is one of the leading vegetables suppliers in Oman, which sells various types of vegetables to the various types of customers like super markets, vegetables and fruits shops, hyper markets, hostels, catering companies, restaurants etc. The company has the head office in central market Al-Mawalah, Muscat. The Company intends to automate the process of imports and local purchases, sales and delivery, accounts and administration. Company has many distribution lines with different types of vehicles like pickups, 3-ton trucks, 10-ton trucks and containers. Company has many employees like managers, sales managers, accounts managers, supervisors, truck drivers, loaders, helpers and administrative staff. For the company logistic management is a priority since the vegetables have short shelf life. The overall automation process may result in a very huge database of both structured and unstructured data, which, may need frequent updates. This sort of data may also be considered as big data.
Consider you are responsible to carry out a study of the requirements of registering customers and vegetable sales; suggest a possible solution of designing such a database. Propose a conceptual model, a database management system and related security measures in-line with system data management. You can make relevant assumptions required to formulate business rules, security, and administration.
Based on the above information execute the following tasks. Should there be a need, you can make suitable assumptions to execute the said tasks.
Task 2:
Design an Entity Relationship Diagram (ERD) to model the above scenario. Identify the different entities (Maximum 10 and minimum 5) and attributes for each entity. Suggest and justify the choice of relationship and cardinality of the relationship. State the assumptions (if any) made by you to develop the ERD based on your research. Provide detailed analysis and justification for the selection of entities and attributes based on your research.
(15 Marks)
Task 3:
Assume that you are responsible to set up a sustainable datacenter for the above mentioned scenario of for the company. You are required to hire different types of IT professionals to manage your data center which include IT technician, network administrators, system administrators and database administrator. You are required to research the roles and responsibilities of database administrator for the datacenter. Critically analyze the roles and responsibilities based on your research to hire a database administrator.
(10 Marks)
Task 4: As a database administrator evaluate different Database Management system Software for the above scenario. You are required to prepare a technical and financial feasibility report. You are required to critically analyse each aspects and suggest the best suitable database management system software for the above scenario with appropriate justifications.
ECM-38IS.1 (Individual Assignment) 3
(15 Marks)
Database Systems and Administration (ECM38IS.1) –SPRING-20-CW2 (Individual Assignment)
Task 5: As a database administrator identification of specific roles for application users, authentication policy, storage management and database recovery are critical. The efficiency and complexity of database administration depends on the identified strategy and tools. Propose and critically review user management, backup/recovery strategy, storage management/techniques formulated for the system discussed in Task 2-4.
(15 Marks)
Task 6: There will be an industry speaker talk on security of huge databases during the semester. You are required to attend the same without fail and submit a report comprising an executive summary including self-reflections on the industry guest speaker talk. (5 Marks)
Task 7: Select any course in MOOC from the link in Moodle, You are required to watch the video and submit the certificate on the selected course.
ECM-38IS.1 (Individual Assignment) 4
(5 Marks)
Part B
Write a research article in IEEE Format on “research article can cover big data concepts; present trends in database management, technology enhancements regarding databases or any innovative ideas regarding database administration”. The research article can be approximately 2500 words.
Present the research article using a poster presentation covering the following aspects of research:
 Problem specification, importance of research and research questions
 Theoretical framework
 Rigor of literature review
 Methods or empirical analysis techniques;
As a Post Graduate student, you are required to spend time in research and study. Apply the research skills (such as ability to formulate research questions; technical and analytical skills to solve those questions, ability to communicate results) to prepare your article. It is expected that a Post Graduate student demonstrates the research abilities to expand his/her knowledge on latest database technology. Importantly, to achieve the above goal, you are expected to learn with much greater independence and need to do a significant background reading on the chosen topic. The template (Microsoft word file) for the article will be made available on the Moodle soon.