The database that we have constructed is based on is based on some stringent requirements by our client. This requests were both ensured to meet the nature of the information, the way it will be entered, as well as other stringent criteria like availability of information. Since our client has a low amount of resources as far as people to enter or update the database, we had to use the KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid) principle behind the design as well as the construction of the database. Anything that would make the database rigid, and make the maintenance aspect difficult would result in a failure of the database, as well as a failure of our efforts.
Some of
the strict business rules that were implemented as well as kept in mind during
the entire modeling stage and the physical design stage are: -
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Data entry is a key part of
this database, if this database is not maintained it will be of little use to
both our client as well as the users who will be using this database. We have
designed an entire set of easy navigational user views, this would make the
client find the data entry less tedious, and ensure that all aspects of
integrity are maintained by controlling the access of the user to the
administrative back end and keeping it to the minimum.
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The information that is to be
filled into the database will not be steady, the information is of a nature in
which it will slowly filter through, and all these pieces of information would
then be entered into the database. This is one of the challenges as well as one
of the requests that our client made to us.
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At any given stage a property
may not have an owner – by this our client meant that since most of these brown
fields are environmentally unsafe as they may have been abandoned due to
various reasons. Hence the owners may be hesitant to give their names of fear
of being reprimanded and made to bear the cost of the clean up.
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The financial and tax
information of a property may not be up to the current date, however all kinds
of arrangements have been made to ensure that any updates and new information
can be added very easily.
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Our client is still building
their infrastructure to go online with this service, and offer various other
kinds of services for the economic development of counties as well as the
restoring of brown fields. This will still take time and they requested us to
have the flexibility to enter data that would be collected over the net,
manually. This would be done until their web development is complete, and the
site is up. Until then they plan to use this database – as a fully functional
and operational database.