[Year 12 SofDev] Special thanks to Associate Professor Steven Bird

Tue Oct 14 10:58:39 EST 2008

Hi Steven,

    I think we are very fortunate and privileged to have your time and
expertise on these lists. 

I am sure you have other pressing demands on your time not least of
which in your lecturing and related duties in the Uni of Melbourne
Computer Science faculty and other projects, research and activities you
are working on as recorded on http://www.csse.unimelb.edu.au/~sb/ .

Your explanations and insights into implications of certain questions
on both the final and practice exams in Software Development can only
help us all to become better teachers if for no other reason than the
seed it plants to think about problems from another perspective and
hopefully continue the discussion and seek further clarification.

 So on behalf of the list membership, please keep your comments coming
and thanks for your time.

Best Wishes

Kevork Krozian
IT Manager , Forest Hill College
k.krozian at fhc.vic.edu.au
http://www.fhc.vic.edu.au
Mobile: 0419 356 034

>>> "Steven Bird" <sb at csse.unimelb.edu.au> 14/10/2008 11:57 am >>>
On Tue, Oct 14, 2008 at 11:13 AM, Adrian Janson
<janson.adrian.a at edumail.vic.gov.au> wrote:
> Yes * quite correct.  My students spotted this as well.  The x5 is
not
> required.

There's some other problems though.  A database with 20,000 customers
should have one or more indexes to support efficient retrieval, and
these take space.  Nightly dumps take space as well.  If the question
is getting at how much disk space we should budget for, these factors
are relevant.

It would be bad database design to store postcode and suburb with each
customer record (cf [1]).  Instead a customer record should contain a
foreign key to a table of postcodes, e.g. a subset of [2].  We're told
the company only has sales in a "local area", so perhaps we'd only
have to deal with a dozen postcodes.  That table would be a constant
size overhead which is easy to compute, and the foreign key would be a
short integer (e.g. TINYINT).

The question treats a database as if it was a spreadsheet, and only
requires students to know the relative sizes of characters, bytes, and
bits.

It would be good if students learnt about normalization and the
importance of avoiding duplication in a database.  It would also be
nice if they learnt what Unicode is, and that 1 character != 1 byte.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Database_normalization 
[2] http://www1.auspost.com.au/download/pc-full.zip 

-Steven Bird
http://www.csse.unimelb.edu.au/~sb/ 

> A database for an online marketing company keeps records of all
customers
> who have requested coupons and notifications of sales in their local
area.
> They currently have a dedicated customer base of around 5000
customers, but
> wish to grow this to 20,000 customers within the next 5 years. How
much
> storage capacity will be required to store 20,000 customer records
for the
> entire 5 year period, given the following information:
> First Name * 50 characters
> Last Name * 50 characters
> Address * 100 characters
> Suburb * 50 characters
> Phone number * 10 characters each (2 phone numbers per customer)
> Email address * 50 characters
> Postcode * 4 characters
> Number of coupons received * 32-bit number
>
>
>
> A. 34,200,000 bytes
>
> B. 32,400,000 bytes
>
> C. 35,600,000 bytes
>
> D. 32,800,000 bytes
>
>
>
> The solution gives D with the explanation
>
> 50+50+100+50+10+10+50+4+4 =
>
> 328
> 328 x 20000 x 5 = 32,800,000
>
> Why multiply by 5?  Would the company recreate the entire records
each
> year?  I'd design it differently..
>
>
>
> Appreciate your help.
>
>
>
>
>
> Quentin Lydall
>
> Head of ICT
>
> Beaconhills College Valley Campus
>
> 30-34 Toomuc Valley Road,
>
> Pakenham
>
> 3810
>
> Phone: 1300 002 225 Extn 3016
>
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