The Database Development Process Questions and Answers

Answer: C

Correct answer: Both A and B.

A packaged model brings the accumulated experience of many implementations in an industry, so it starts from a structure that has already been thought through, and it saves the time of deriving it again. Both benefits are real, and both are contingent on tailoring it to the organisation rather than adopting it unchanged.

Answer: C

Correct answer: Information engineering

The strategic planning factors are the organisation’s goals, its critical success factors and its problem areas - the things the plan must respond to. Information engineering is a methodology for doing the planning, so it is the means rather than one of the factors considered.

Answer: B

Correct answer: False

Integrity and security requirements are established during analysis and logical design, where what the data means and who may see it are settled. Physical design implements them - choosing constraints, indexes and access structures - but it does not identify them.

Answer: A

Correct answer: True

Prototyping builds a working version quickly, shows it to users and refines it in cycles, which suits a project whose requirements are not fully known at the outset. It is widely used alongside the traditional life cycle rather than instead of it, and database prototypes are particularly effective because users react to what they can see.

Answer: C

Correct answer: programming schema.

The three-schema architecture has an internal schema describing physical storage, a conceptual schema describing the whole logical structure, and external schemas describing each user group’s view. There is no programming schema; the point of the architecture is precisely to insulate programs from the other two levels.

Answer: B

Correct answer: False

Incremental commitment is precisely what allows redirection and termination: the project is reviewed at each stage and resources are committed only to the next one, so a project that is going wrong can be stopped before more is spent. Committing everything at the outset is what removes that option.

Answer: B

Correct answer: True

Maintenance runs for the whole working life of the database and its applications, which is usually years or decades, while every step before it is measured in months. Fixing errors, adding requirements, tuning and adapting to change all fall within it, and it accounts for the greater part of the total effort.

Answer: A

Correct answer: Conceptual data modeling

Conceptual data modelling identifies the entities, attributes and relationships for the area being developed, and does so independently of any product. It is the detailed analysis stage: the enterprise model above it is a summary, and the logical design below it converts the result into a particular technology.

Answer: B

Correct answer: False

The systems development life cycle applies to database development as it does to any system development, and the database steps map onto its phases - planning, analysis, design, implementation and maintenance. Prototyping and other approaches are used as well, but the life cycle is not excluded.

Answer: A

Correct answer: A major category of data about people, place, and things

An entity type is a category of things the organisation keeps data about - customer, product, order - and the individual instances are its occurrences. Departments, software and business processes are all things an organisation has, but they are not what the term denotes.