Vehicle Theft Database
- Imagine you are a participant in an information systems project to design a vehicle theft database for a state law enforcement agency. This database will provide information about stolen vehicles (e.g., autos, golf carts, SUVs, and trucks), with details about the vehicle theft as well as the stolen vehicle itself. These details will be useful to law enforcement officers investigating the vehicle theft.
- Write your response in a Word document and include a one-paragraph response for each bullet point below.
- · Identify 6 data attributes you would capture for each vehicle theft incident. Explain why each of these are important.
- · Which data attribute would you designate as the primary key? Explain why.
- OK – what is a primary key in a database? I had a hard time finding an explanation of the term that wasn’t overly technical. Hope this helps – A data table’s primary key is a special field in a table. Every table created in a Database (like Access – which you may or may not be familiar with, though that doesn’t matter for this assignment) you create should have a primary key field.
- Why and what is a primary key field?
- OK – what is a primary key in a database? I had a hard time finding an explanation of the term that wasn’t overly technical. Hope this helps – A data table’s primary key is a special field in a table. Every table created in a Database (like Access – which you may or may not be familiar with, though that doesn’t matter for this assignment) you create should have a primary key field.
- · Each record in the table needs a piece of data that is unique to that record. No other record can have the same information – think “social security #” or a patient ID in a medical situation” – no two people will have the same value for those items.
- · In a database, the role of the primary key field allows the data to uniquely identify each record. For example, in your Customer database table, the Customer Number (or you might call it Customer ID) would be the primary key — there is only one customer number 1, one customer number 2, and so on. Here’s part of a data table for “Spouses”….to tell one record from another a field was created called Spouse ID – no two people would have the same value for this field.
- · You can’t use an address because more than one customer might live in the same town, state or even have a street # that is the same. So, one field of each record needs to be totally unique – no other record can have the same data. It could be a social security number, an employee ID number or something of that nature.
- · Nerds pitch a fit if your database doesn’t have at least one primary key field…. yes, you can have more than one field that is unique for each record, but you only need to identify one for this assignment
- · Predict one problem you might encounter with keeping the data current? Explain what you would do to prevent this from occurring.
