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Copyright © 2014 Pearson Education, Inc.
Data definition, 219 Information policy, 235
Data dictionary, 219 Key field, 217
Data governance, 236 Non-relational database management systems, 217
Data inconsistency, 213 Normalization, 222
Data manipulation language, 220 Online analytical processing (OLAP), 227
Data mart, 225 Primary key, 217
Data mining, 228 Program-data dependence, 214
Data quality audit, 237 Record, 211
Data redundancy, 213 Referential integrity, 223
Data warehouse, 225 Relational DBMS, 216
Database, 214 Sentiment analysis, 230
Database administration, 236 Structured Query Language (SQL), 220
Database management system (DBMS), 214 Text mining, 230
Database server, 233 Tuple, 217
Entity, 211 Web mining, 230
Entity-relationship diagram, 223
Teaching Suggestions
The essential message of this chapter is the statement that “How businesses store,
organize, and manage their data has a tremendous impact on organizational
effectiveness.” Data have now become central and even vital to an organization’s
survival.
The opening vignette, “Banco de Credito del Peru Banks on Better Data Management,”
describes the difficulties the organization experienced trying to provide its managers and
employees with accurate, current, and complete information. Most of the trouble was a
result of having isolated systems that were time-consuming and expensive to update and
use. Because the data were not consolidated into one system, many times the same piece
of data were entered multiple times without any consistency. That led to conflicts and
inaccurate reporting.
Only by consolidating and integrating the data were the problems resolved. Most of the
problems this organization faced are common throughout the business world. This
chapter explores how to correct and prevent these kinds of situations and how digital
firms can use database technologies to increase their competitive advantages.
Section 6.1, “Organizing Data in a Traditional File Environment,” introduces basic
key terms like field, record, file, database, entity and attribute. Try using a simple
spreadsheet print-out to demonstrate these terms. The section points out the drawbacks
and difficulties organizations experience with traditional methods of file management.
They are: systems grow independently without a company-wide plan; data redundancy