Throughout the course, you will be working on a course project database that you will create and maintain.
This will give you the opportunity to apply the skills you are learning to a real-world situation.
For your project, you are a consultant working for Half-Eagle Rarities, an auction house specializing in rare coins from around the world. Like everyone else, Half-Eagle Rarities wants to get on the Internet, and establish a niche in the world of online commerce. Your client has just purchased a software package designed to manage coin auctions over the Internet using a Web-based interface.
Your mission is to set up and create the database to support that software.
This is how the logical design looks like:
Your objective is to
create the database,
create the tables to match the design shown above, and
work with the systems integrators to make minor changes as they customize the software.
As we proceed, you will build this database incrementally through project-related exercises. You will start on this once you begin learning the tasks involved. Here are some of the real-world aspects of this project scenario:
There really is a company, Teletrade, that conducts coin auctions online.
You can view their Web page at Teletrade
The design includes one table. This is the bid table, and it will likely sustain a high volume of inserts while auctions are taking place. Insert performance on this table will be critical to the success of the application.
Referential integrity needs to be enforced.
There is a many-to-many relationship between the Lot and Coin tables.
This has been resolved into 2 one-to-many relationships through the use of the Coins_in_lot table.
Before we actually begin creating this database, you need to learn how to interact with Oracle software, and you need to learn just what makes up an Oracle database. The next module shows you how to use Server Manager, which is a command-line tool used to create and manage Oracle databases. Following that are some modules on architecture that explain the various files, memory structures, and processes that all combine to make a database instance.