System Analysis and Design course

Website Design and Architecture Introduction This chapter focuses on the challenge of how to manage the ongoing development and maintenance of Web-based systems. In particular, this chapter targets the problem of Web systems that have dynamic content changes on a regular basis. Indeed, the Web has required businesses to become more dynamic and reactive in their thinking. Web sites that contain old images are considered slow to react to market needs. Users expect to see up-to-date information immediately. Take the New York Times Web site for example. It generates new content dynamically as stories become available (see Figure 16.1). The problem facing many organizations is how to provide a development infrastructure that can allow users to change content without the assistance of developers, and how these systems can provide easier development for programmers and database administrators. Furthermore, there are many organi- zations that need to receive ecommerce content from multip...

Data Warehousing Introduction This chapter focuses on how to extract information from database systems. This information will be used for decision support systems (DSS) purposes and typically be presented to the user in an on-line display format or on a report. As initially discussed in Chapter 13, the concept behind DSS is that it deals with data “after the fact,” meaning that the data is no longer in a production mode, but rather in a storage mode where it can be used for different forms of analytical processing. The major benefit of operating on processed data is that it cannot be changed and therefore can be accessed without concern for data integrity. Another salient issue is that because the data is not subject to change, it can be copied multiple times, allowing for some interesting performance improvements and “flattening” of the data stored in the relational database. The referential integrity that was attained in a production database does not maximize performance for the...