The system is a database written using Microsoft Access. It will primarily be required to hold information on various students, but will also be required to print various reports on the data.

The system must be used by the following:

• Full time/Sandwich Course students
• Academic Staff – Computing Dept.
• Administrative Staff – Computing Dept.

The system will be required to print reports on the students using the following data elements:

• By Personal Tutor Group
• By Seminar Group
• By Module
• By Course Type
• By Course Mode

Various data elements are required for the root ‘STUDENT’ table of the database. These have been identified as:

Using entity relationships and determinancy diagrams, it can be demonstrated how this data can be broken down into more managable chunks…

In the back two pages of the assignment brief, several tables are depicted. By using this data as reference, many of the data items may be removed from ‘STUDENT’.

These Relationship diagrams refer to Student as a single student:

The Option entity defines a lot of the data for the student. It defines seminar group and therefore also defines semester tutor, semester group, personal tutor, personal tutor group. For semester group and tutor, the element semester is also required. This is further demonstrated in the following determinancy diagrams:

As you can now see, all the elements to the right can now be removed to be referenced by the elements to the left. This leaves the following table:

By using this new ‘STUDENT’ table, the rest of the data elements can be referenced from other tables using Access Queries.

Only the Optional module is being stored in the ‘STUDENT’ table. This is because the other modules (4 for semester 1, 5 for semester 2) are compulsory, and therefore the same for every student.

The following are definitions of the elements used in the ‘STUDENT’ table:

• Student_ID

• Student_Name

• Course_Code

• Semester