Database Design Process Project (Preparation) - Essay Example

Moreover, it offers specific built-in templates that facilitate the users to choose well suited ERD template according to the needs and requirements of the projects. Once a template has been selected by the user, the shapes (entities, relationships, category, etc.) can be drawn by just pick and drop method. The entity represents a table of a database and the relationship shape represents the relation between two tables which can be one to one, one to many, etc. After dragging an entity to the drawing board, the user can add an entity / table name, diverse columns and their names according to the requirements of the table, the data types of the created columns, selection of primary key, check / tick if a particular column must have a value and the column referred to as the foreign key (if any).

In this way, the user can add several entities / tables as per the requirements of the database design under development. After adding all the entities to the drawing board, the user can add relationships between the entities by relating the primary key with foreign key and this can be done by dragging the particular shapes. Moreover, the MS Visio provides the functionalities to add triggers, indexes and notes on entities and their relationships. When the users are done with creating the entity relationship diagram, the file can be saved in .

vsd format in the hard drive of the PC / laptop; moreover, the saved file can be edited or updated when required. The MS Visio offers the functionality of viewing the complete diagram, page setup and printing the diagram (Sethi, 2006). It is required for the Riordan Manufacturing Virtual Organization to develop policies, guidelines, standards and practices to put in place for the use of the MS Visio. I would suggest the organization to use the conventional standards of ERD elements to represent an entity there should be a rectangular shape along with one row having the entity name and one rectangular shape should only represent one entity.

The primary key of the entity should be represented by a key symbol, the relationships between the entities should be represented with dotted lines and the color of the foreign key attribute should be red. Furthermore, the overall ER diagram should be easy to understand and precise to conceive by everyone, therefore, it is recommended that the users should add proper notes that would assist and aid the users to understand the diagram completely. It is pertinent to mention here that the MS Visio offers the same template to develop ER diagrams.

The practices and guidelines for naming convention of the tables and attributes should be clarified to the employees and users of the MS Visio in the virtual organization. I would suggest to the management of the organization that the table / entity name should always start with ‘tbl’ characters, for example the entity name ‘tblCustomer’ i-e the entity or table having the information of the customer. The pre-characters of the attribute name should be understandable having first character of the table name and capital characters like the attribute name ‘cFName’ can be read as the first name of the customer.

The employees of the virtual organization should be given proper training on the guidelines, standards and practices for using the MS Visio to develop the ER diagrams. The employees should be guided on saving the file names and should have