NURS 6411: Information and Knowledge Management | Week 5

Throughout this course, you have been exploring how databases are used in health care organizations to store, organize, and navigate large quantities of patient data and information. Before you can develop those databases, however, you need to have a firm grasp of key principles and terminology. This will ensure that you can create a database that will save and retrieve information in the most efficient manner. Microsoft Access is a database application that can be used to simplify the process. It is, therefore, an important and powerful tool for nurse informaticists to have in their toolkit. In order to use it effectively, however, you must understand the structure of a database. Core Database Principles Nursing Essay.

This week, you review some of the key concepts involved in creating a database. In particular, the focus is on examining exactly what is meant by the term relational database. You also gain hands-on experience using Access. You begin working with features in Access including tables and queries.

Learning Objectives

Students will:

• Analyze the relationship between relational and entity relational databases
• Develop a conceptual model for a database

Learning Resources

Required Readings

Coronel, C. & Morris, S. (2017). Database systems: Design, implementation, and management (12th ed.). Boston, MA: Cengage Learning.

• Chapter 3, “The Relational Database Model” (review) (pp. 71-106)
• Chapter 4, “The Entity Relationship Model (ERM)” (review) (pp. 117-152)

Cox, J. & Lambert, J. (2013). Step by step: Microsoft Access 2013. Richland, WA: Microsoft Press.

• Chapter 2, “Creating Databases and Simple Tables” (pp. 53–90)>In this chapter, the authors demonstrate how to create databases both from templates and manually, how to construct a table structure, and how to define the relationship between tables.
• Chapter 3, “Create Simple Forms” (pp. 91–114)The focus of this chapter is creating forms, which enables standardized data to be entered into a database. The authors demonstrate how to create, format and customize the layout of forms.
• Chapter 4, “Display Data” (pp. 115–134)This chapter concentrates on sorting and filtering information within a database in order to locate and display desired information. It begins with simple sorts and progresses through displaying information that matches specific, multiple criteria.

Optional Resources Core Database Principles Nursing Essay

There are a wide variety of online tutorials available to assist with using Microsoft Access. Below are several you might consider, as needed:

Goodwill Community Foundation, Inc. (2010). Access 2010. Retrieved from http://www.gcflearnfree.org/office

This free resource provides a series of lessons, interactives, and video tutorials to assist in learning how to use Access 2010.

Pollock, A. (2010). Access 2010 essential training. Retrieved from http://www.lynda.com/Access-2010-tutorials/essential-training/62642-2.html

This series of videos provides detailed instruction on all aspects of Microsoft Access 2010 use. This resource requires a paid subscription.

Discussion: Core Database Principles

When embarking on any new project or learning experience, it is essential that you have a strong foundation of understanding constructed from key concepts and parameters. As you begin your work with databases and database design, you should develop a firm understanding of key concepts and parameters that are critical to the foundation of all database design.

In this Discussion, you examine these key fundamental principles of database design.

To prepare:

• Review the information in this week’s Learning Resources concerning relational and entity relational databases. Focus on how the two are interconnected.
• Review information concerning cardinalities and consider what they are, how they are developed, and their role in database design.
• Review information concerning business rules, what they represent, and how they are reflected in the entity relationship diagrams.
• Review the conceptual model (Figure Q4.5) on page 150 of your text, Database Systems: Design, Implementation, and Management  Think of a similar example of how each of these concepts would be reflected in a database design for your own organization.

By Day 3

Post a brief analysis of the connection between entity relational modeling and relational databases. Discuss a brief example of a conceptual model that could be used in your own organization and list at least one business rule and two cardinalities that apply to that model.

Read a selection of your colleagues’ responses.

By Day 6

Respond to at least two of your colleagues on two different days. Help clarify their explanations of key concepts. For the conceptual model they provided, suggest an additional cardinality that would apply and why it would be necessary to use it. Core Database Principles Nursing Essay.

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION;

Key fundamental principles of database design.

Introduction

Database design is a difficult subject to understand, especially for beginners. It’s not an easy topic to master, but once you learn the fundamentals of database design, it’ll be easier for you to grasp the other aspects of a database system. Below are some fundamental principles that you should follow in designing a database:

1. Normalization

Normalization is the process of organizing data in a way that reduces redundancy and improves data integrity. It’s an important step in database design, because it lays the foundation for other strategies and techniques you can use to make your database more efficient.

Normalization allows you to store information about items (such as people) separately from other information about those items (such as their address). In other words, normalization separates out each piece of data so that it can be stored independently of other pieces of information related to that item. This makes it easier for you to retrieve each piece when needed—and also prevents errors from creeping into your system if someone tries looking up something with an invalid address number or misspelling an entry by mistake!

2. De-Normalization

De-normalization is a process of removing the normalization rules.

De-normalization can be done by using denormalized tables. This technique reduces the number of joins in your schema and speeds up queries that use joins.

The following example shows how you can create a denormalized table by using the SELECT INTO statement.

3. Primary Keys

Primary keys are used to uniquely identify each row in a table. They’re also used to create relationships between tables, and should be as small as possible. In general:

• If a column is not required for primary key purposes, it can be dropped from your database design altogether.

• The primary key must have an index on it, which means that its value will be stored in memory by default when you’re running queries against it (in other words: fast). For example: if you’ve got an ID column called “id” with autoincrementing values (1 through 1 million), then there needs to be an index on this column so that MySQL knows where each row lives within its database structure—and therefore how much space each individual record takes up!

4. Indexing

Indexing is a technique used to speed up data retrieval by providing an index of all the rows in a table. This allows you to query for specific values, rather than having to scan through all the rows in order. It’s also useful for improving performance as it reduces disk IO and reduces time spent processing commands (from SQL).

Indexes can be created using many different methods: B-tree indexes, hash indexes etc., but all of these methods have their own pros and cons – some are faster than others depending on what kind of workload you plan on putting on them; some require more maintenance than others depending on how often they need updating (i.e., if there are lots of changes made).

5. Atomicity

Atomicity is the ability of a transaction to be performed as a whole. If the atomicity property is not satisfied, then it will be rolled back and re-executed. If a transaction has been executed as atomic, then all its changes will either occur in their entirety or none of them will be made at all.

Atomicity ensures that your application doesn’t experience data loss due to inconsistent states between two parts of your system (e.g., two processes). For example, if you need to write some data into one table but then read them back out again later on another occasion with different values for those same fields; this could cause problems because either way there would be no guarantee that everything would come out right the second time around might overwrite what was written before or vice versa depending on how many rows were inserted/updated during both runs!

6. Consistency

Consistency is the most important principle of database design.

Consistency ensures that the database is always up-to-date and accurate.

It requires that all transactions are processed in a certain order and that no two transactions can be processed simultaneously.

Consistency is the most important principle of database design because it ensures that the database is always up-to-date and accurate. It requires that all transactions are processed in a certain order, and that no two transactions can be processed simultaneously. Consistency also prevents data loss due to power outages or computer failures.

The above principles are vital in database design and management

The above principles are vital in database design and management. They ensure data integrity, consistency, atomicity and normalization.

The best way to ensure data integrity is to design databases with the ACID principles in mind. This means that all database transactions should be atomic, consistent and durable.

Atomicity refers to the fact that database transactions should be all-or-nothing. This means that either all of the changes in a transaction are applied or none of them are. Consistency refers to how databases are designed to ensure that data is consistent with itself and with other data. Durability refers to whether or not changes made by a database transaction will persist in case of a system failure.

Conclusion

Database design principles are essential for a database to be efficient and effective. Without proper design principles, the database will not function properly and cause problems for your organization. The above seven principles are the key fundamentals that you should follow in order to have an optimal database structure that can handle large volumes of data from many users at once without any issue.