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