SEMQDB. Databases for Historians.
Autumn 1998.
Exercise 3. Designing a Database. Weeks 7 & 8.
This exercise should be handed in by the end of week 8 (Friday
20th November 1998). Solutions should be placed in the pigeon-hole labelled
"SEMQDB" on the lower-ground floor of the Aston-Webb building (or
brought to the Computer Science school office) before 5pm on that Friday.
Extend your database Sidbury to model
the population of the village of Sidbury from 1560 to
1812. I shall give you details of the 1672 hearth tax and you may look for any
other relevant documents to assist in this study. (The parish registers have
been published and may be found in the university library).
You will need to add at least one table to contain details of the
people in Sidbury, including the name (not a unique
identifier since sons are often called after their fathers) and you will have
to decide whether the record for a person only refers to the time-period over
which that person was known by that name (i..e. do
married women have one or two records and if they have two, how are they
linked).
Once you have decided how many extra tables are needed for your
expanded database, you should produce an entity-relationship diagram to
describe this database. This will need to be in the form described in chapter
five of the textbook by Harvey and Press and will need to be sufficiently
detailed for you to implement the database in your final exercise (exercises
1,2 and 3 each count 10% of the mark for the course, exercise 4 will count 20%
and cannot be started until the design in exercise 3 has been approved).
Susan Laflin. 3rd November
1998