WEEK NINE QUESTIONS

Chapter 4 - Databases

1. What are some of the difficulties in managing data? –Firms have massive quantities of data which must be stored for long periods of time.
–In many business’s data is scattered into many different systems. By centralising the data we get better data, and better security.
–In order to make decisions strategically and politically, External data needs to be included, therefore it is important that data gathered must be secure and of high integrity.

2. What are the various sources for data?
Internal data: comes from entities within an organisation, such as corporate databases.
External data: comes from outside an organisation, can be gathered from commercial databases, government reports and corporate Web sites.
Personal data: such employee details, thoughts, opinions and experiences.

3. What is a primary key and a secondary key?
Primary key: an entity in a database that uniquely and accurately identifies a record.
Secondary key: identifies specific records, but is intended to index data rather than specifically identify. Such as product keys.

4. What is an entity and a relationship?
Entity: a person, place, thing or event such as a customer, which information is maintained about.
Relationship: a relationship is the way in which the entities relate to each other.

There are three types of entities: one to one, many to many and one to many.

5. What are the advantages and disadvantages of relational databases?
Advantages:
Provides a lot of flexibility in a variety of queries
Easy to tell which records are joined

Disadvantage:
If the overall design is too complex than it will have slow search and access times

6. What is knowledge management?
A process that helps organisations combine and manipulate all data sources and bring them to a central screen. This allows for data and knowledge to be organised and selected data on demand. Having such access to data is essential to an organisations success, because knowledge is a form of capital. A common knowledge management system is a portal.

7. What is the difference between tacit knowledge and explicit knowledge?
Tacit knowledge is highly personal and hard to formalize, it uses explicit knowledge to gain insight and expertise. It is basically under surface knowledge. Explicit knowledge is much more objective, detailed and rational. Explicit knowledge refers to the more technical type of knowledge.